Poetry & Covid-19

The publication of this anthology comes a year into the Covid-19 pandemic. In the summer of 2020, we invited nineteen UK poets to partner with poets from around the world, to work collaboratively on poems responding to the virus. The poems herein are as personal as they are communal, and as local as they are international. Between them, the writers reside in all of the world's permanently populated continents, recognising that the pandemic has truly hit us everywhere. Their diversities of aesthetics and poetics, of Covid experiences - at a distance and/or embodied, anecdotal and/or dramatic - are further significant to their inclusion and their work. The pairs of contributors are: Sinead Morrissey and Jan Wagner (trans. Iain Galbraith); Carol Leeming and Rakhshan Rizwan; George Szirtes and Alvin Pang; Vahni Capildeo and Vivek Narayanan; Rory Waterman and Togara Muzanenhamo; Rachael Allen and Ilya Kaminsky; Zoe Skoulding and Yana Lucila Lema Otavalo; Inua Ellams and Omar Musa; Matthew Welton and Hazel Smith; Vidyan Ravinthiran and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra; Anthony Caleshu and Mariko Nagai; Selima Hill and Wang Xiaoni (trans. Eleanor Goodman); Declan Ryan and Linda Stern Zisquit; David Herd and Sharmistha Mohant; Luke Kennard and Hwang Yu Won (trans. Jake Levine); Andre Naffis-Sahely and Stacy Hardy; Harriet Tarlo and Craig Santos Perez; Jennifer Cooke and Jessica Pujol Duran; Momtaza Mehri and A. E. Stallings.

Anthony Caleshu is the author of four books of poems, most recently, A Dynamic Exchange Between Us (Shearsman Books, 2019), and three critical books about poetry, most recently, editor of In the Air: The Poetry of Peter Gizzi (Wesleyan University Press, 2018). His latest poems and short fiction can be found in Manchester Review, Mechanic's Institute Review and Granta online. He is Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing at University of Plymouth, where he leads the MA Creative Writing, and runs the small poetry press, Periplum. Rory Waterman is the author of three collections with Carcanet: Tonight the Summer's Over (2013), a PBS Recommendation shortlisted for a Seamus Heaney Award; Sarajevo Roses (2017), shortlisted for the Ledbury Forte Prize, and Sweet Nothings (2020). He also publishes a lot of literary criticism. He co-edits New Walk Editions, and is on the English faculty at Nottingham Trent University.