COVID Spring II
To help support New Hampshire residents impacted by COVID-19, Hobblebush Books will donate $2 to the New Hampshire Food Bank for every copy of COVID Spring (volumes I and II) sold.
When COVID Spring was published in 2020, there were no intentions of compiling a second volume. And yet, as the pandemic dragged on, the writing never stopped. On April 30, 2020—the end of National Poetry Month—COVID deaths in the United States reached 63,000; on April 30, 2021, that number exceeded 575,700. Last year, vaccines seemed a distant dream; this April, nervous neighbors and hopeful strangers idled in tidy rows, all waiting to receive their first or second “jab.”
“This trajectory is mirrored in the movement of poems in this anthology, from the melancholy and depression of isolation in 2020 to the resurrection of hope in 2021,” writes New Hampshire Poet Laureate Alexandria Peary in her introduction. “These poets have written with tremendous heart and skill, their craft evident in couplets gone awry, fitting for the time, in surreal and realistic imagery, in prose poems, in neologism and tanka, and in final lines and posed questions.”
Fifty-one poets are represented in COVID Spring II: More Granite State Pandemic Poems, each showcasing their own experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic in New Hampshire. Read the anthology on its own for a slice of history, or experience it alongside the first volume for a broader picture of how our state has been affected during these unprecedented times.
