In this urgent outpouring of American voices, our poets speak to us as they shelter in place, addressing our collective fear, grief, and hope from eloquent and diverse individual perspectives.As the novel coronavirus and its devastating effects began to spread in the United States and around the world, Alice Quinn reached out to poets across the country to see if, and what, they were writing under quarantine. Moved and galvanized by the response, the onetime New Yorker poetry editor and recent former director of the Poetry Society of America began collecting the poems arriving in her inbox, assembling this various, intimate, and intricate portrait of our suddenly altered reality. In these pages, we find poets grieving for relatives they are separated from or recovering from illness themselves, attending to suddenly complicated household tasks or turning to literature for strength, considering the bravery of medical workers or working their own shifts at the hospital, and, as the Black Lives Matter movement has swept the globe, reflecting on the inequities in our society that amplify sorrow and demand our engagement. From fierce and resilient to wistful, darkly humorous, and emblematically reverent about the earth and the vulnerability of human beings in frightening times, the poems in this collection find the words to describe what can feel unspeakably difficult and strange, providing wisdom, companionship, and depths of feeling that enliven our spirits.

Contributors: Julia Alvarez • Sarah Arvio • Jesse Ball • Rick Barot • Ellen Bass • Erin Belieu • Joshua Bennett • April Bernard • Jill Bialosky • David Biespiel • George Bilgere • Sophie Cabot Black • Traci Brimhall• Jericho Brown • Stephanie Burt • Danielle Chapman • Nicholas Christopher • Ama Codjoe • Catherine Cohen • Elizabeth Coleman • Billy Collins • Nicole Cooley • Peter Cooley • Timothy Donnelly • Cornelius Eady • John Freeman • Forrest Gander • Suzanne Gardinier • Deborah Garrison • Tammy Melody Gomez • Rigoberto Gonzalez • George Green • Linda Gregerson • Rachel Eliza Griffiths • Eliza Griswold • Julia Gue • Nathalie Handal • Brooks Haxton • Aleksandar Hemon • Brenda Hillman • Edward Hirsch • Jane Hirshfield • Richie Hofmann • Garrett Hongo • Fanny Howe • Didi Jackson • Major Jackson • Fady Joudah • Stephen Kampa • Vincent Katz • Susan Kinsolving • Ron Koertge • John Koethe • Yusef Komunyakaa • Li-Young Lee • Brad Leithauser • Dana Levin • Ada Limón • Dave Lucas • Amit Majmudar • Sally Wen Mao • Gail Mazur • Shane McCrae • Maureen McLane • Dante Michaux • Susan Minot • Susan Mitchell • Kamilah Aisha Moon • Jim Moore • Tomás Q. Morín • Laura Mullen • Carol Muske-Dukes • Eileen Myles • D. Nurkse • John Okrent • Sharon Olds • Kitty O'Meara • Tommy Orange • Ton Padgett • Sarah Paley • Jay Parini • Carl Phillips • Patrick Phillips • Rowan Ricardo Phillips • Katha Pollitt • Dean Rader • Claudia Rankine • Clare Rossini • Mary Jo Salter • Grace Schulman • Vijay Seshadri • Diane Seuss • Brenda Shaughnessy • Evie Shockley • Elizabeth Spires • Susan Stewart • Tess Taylor • Anne Waldman • Noah Warren • Rosanna Warren • Rex Wilder • Christian Wiman • Mark Wunderlich • Jenny Xie • Jeffrey Yang • Kevin Young • Matthew Zapruder