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This book is a gathering of community. It chronicles our Pandemic Times through the eyes, hearts, and minds of poets. The pandemic took away many things - a bevy of customary comforts, delights, and celebrations - but it also gave us surprising gifts. We hope that what you read here will help you find meaning from your own Pandemic Times and bring a new vision of what it means to be human. On these pages, you will find poems by Jane Hirshfield, Ted Kooser, Dorianne Laux, Stephen Dunn, Naomi Shihab Nye, Thomas Centolella, Marsha de la O, Terry Lucas, Barbara Quick, Melissa Studdard, Loretta Diane Walker, Marge Piercy, and many more poets who will delight and amaze you - some well known and others who also deserve to be read. Every poem in this book has a gift for you. "Poems, like birds, are alive. Each one has a heart, wings, and their own song. Poems remind us, like Kokopelli and the birds, that we too are storytellers, teachers, healers, and that we too have the ability to sing a beautiful future into existence."- Nancy Lee Melmon "Life hasn't changed much for me during the pandemic. I read, I write, I binge watch. I've been gardening, cleaning out old files, closets, drawers, and tossing what I no longer need. I've been doing what I always do when I have time on my hands, puzzles. It reminds me that the broken can be reassembled, which is what we are in the process of doing right now as a people, as a country."- Dorianne Laux "To write a single poem is a selfless act and a minor miracle. In times of trouble people often turn to poems, and poems often turn into prayers."- Joseph Zaccardi

"These small pleasures of intelligent thoughtful, and thought-provoking poems will warm the reader's heart." -Sandra Costich"An old song tells us that "Little things mean a lot," and rarely has this been as true as it is in Small Pleasures, Nikia Leopold's bittersweet engagements with a glorious and mortal world. The title poem describes "Pleasures with the heft of tinsel, / so small they're irreducible." Also irreducible are these sharply observed, precisely crafted poems that contain, and provoke, depths of feeling." -Michael Palma"If you want to be moved, read these poems." -Julia Wendell"Niki Leopold is an exquisite receiver-of sensory news, complex emotions, hints of meaning. Her poems are passionate, delicate, fierce, brave." -Mary Azrael"The sparse, finely made poems in Niki Leopold's Small Pleasures possess the intricacy of snowflakes, each crystalline portrait revealing the wonder of existence encountered in an ordinary moment." -Pauline UchmanowiczNiki Leopold is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars in Poetry, and has a Ph.D. in Art History, also from Hopkins. Her poems have appeared in The American Scholar, Commonweal, Poetry East and Poetry. Finishing Line Press published her chapbook, Dark Feathers. Her children's book, Adam's Crayons, is out from Galileo Press. She lives with her husband in Ruxton, Maryland.

Like one of her beloved muses, the Surrealist painter René Magritte, Rayne O'Brian understands that behind every object there exists another entity. She is kin to the ancient Hasidic rebbes, consorting with the spirit that all matter embodies and calling it forth for our edification and delight. Magritte believed that in a beleaguered world it is much easier to terrorize than to charm. And so, in these gentle, inventive and surprising poems, the poet chooses, as the great painter once said, 'to celebrate joy for the eyes and the mind.' It is no accident then that in Rayne O'Brian's realm a simple kitchen table can speak as movingly as any human. 'Whatever you bring me I love,' it says, inviting us to sit down and stay awhile.Rayne O'Brian lives north of the Golden Gate Bridge in a yellow Victorian with her two long-haired dictionaries. Living on a Song a Day is her debut collection of poems.

As far as poetry is concerned, I am neither sure-footed nor clear. Metaphorically speaking, I am out on a leafless limb with just spider webs and moss, listening to the silken slip of water over stone. And the fact that no one understands me, doesn't make me an artist. My poems will probably not send a flurry of palpitations through the Gallery of Important Things Said, but then, my expectations have always been unreasonably high. Sometimes, when a poem fails, I carry around my ineptitude like a bowling ball, for the rest of the day envisioning the blank page just lying there, a fallen tree from the forest, soundlessly waiting. I would much prefer my poems give the reader a sudden inhalation of joy-a reflexive gasp of awe and wonder-like seeing a Ferris wheel for the first time. If this volume has that effect on even a small portion of the reading populace, I will be ecstatic.About the AuthorThere are few activities that give me more pleasure than nudgingwords across the blankly disquieting page, and pushing clayaround, into, and through itself. I have been fortunate to work intwo disciplines, writing and ceramics, and I have discovered theend result seldom exactly matches the goal in either. It is the workthat matters-the engagement of my imagination, the intuitiveuse of my mind and hands. In the end, the artist discovers art hasa mind of its own, and it is these repeated realizations that enrichmy life. As much as any other work that I do, these small transformativejourneys carry me (for the most part) forward.My mother owned a bookstore from 1962 to 1985 in Petaluma,California. It was called Alta's Old Book Shop, and its valuelay not in glossy modernity, but in its being a sort of dusty deliveryroom for the birth of ideas. It was for me, a refuge from hastyjudgment, a source for answers and insights which enlarged mypersonal life and gave it meaning, and also generated an impulseto write.I am currently teaching a poetry writing class at the VintageHouse Senior Center in Sonoma as part of the Santa Rosa JuniorCollege Older Adults Program. There is magic in this group ofpeople; they are blossoming as poets and contributing immeasurablyto my own ability to write poetry. I am most thankful fortheir presence in my life.

“Among cornfields, junkyards, and a Dairy Queen, the eclectic castof Rustin Larson’s Lost Letters and Windfalls marches across a ruralstage: an old woman small ‘like a burlap bag/ full of nylons,’ familymembers, angels, finches, the wind, the muse, and a young girl in aDegas painting. The poet asserts: ‘The light falls upon all things. Ihave/ my memory of you—quiet as a/ picture frame among all thesebroken houses.’ In poem after poem, Larson captures images firmlycast in time yet eternal—even slightly holy: ‘But here’s what we are:each man, each woman,/ each neuter object, a church.’”“‘Listen,’ Larson urges, ‘the world/ begins in a moment.’ Themoments described in these poems are painterly and vivid. The poettrusts only his ‘sense of touch.’ They conjure a world of isolatedstillness where characters can ‘choose to stand outside of ourselvesif we wish, the snow falling.’ But also a world of connection where‘planets are fishing/ for us, wanting/ us’ and ‘[t]he moon is thefriend of the earth / and the earth of the sun.’ This is a book of smalltendernesses and lightning bolts that will stay with you.” Rustin Larson’s poetry has appeared in TheNew Yorker, The Iowa Review, and NorthAmerican Review. He won 1st Editor’sPrize from Rhino and was a prize winner inThe National Poet Hunt and The ChesterH. Jones Foundation contests. A graduateof the Vermont College MFA in Writing,Larson was an Iowa Poet at The Des Moines National PoetryFestival, and a featured poet at the Poetry at Round Top Festival.He is a poetry professor at Maharishi University, a writing instructorat Kirkwood Community College, and has also been awriting instructor at Indian Hills Community College.His honors and awards also include Pushcart Prize Nominee(seven times, 1988-2010); featured writer, DMACC Celebrationof the Literary Arts, 2007, 2008; and finalist, New EnglandReview Narrative Poetry Competition, 1985.