Around the Ides of March in 2020, it became clear that Rome would never be the same. The news turned ominous shades of fire, while emails and texts began to let me know I would not be traveling as much this year as I am used to. One by one, the lights went out in the city of my career, and income. Every reading, conference, workshop, and music gig I had scheduled from April forward began to drop off the calendar, and I felt a strange mix of both thrill and fear at the prospect of being homebound for a time. But when I wrote the check for my half of the next house payment, I knew what hell awaited me come June… or maybe July. Even poets can do the math when there is only outgo.

In those early days, my wife was having a Zoom Happy Hour with two friends, Sarah Flournoy and Liz McIlravy. I mention their names because the concept for this project-of writing commissioned poems for a donation of some kind-was their idea. And what I owe them, I haven’t quite calculated yet. But that idea has turned out to be the saving grace of my year, and career. I couldn’t have imagined the effect and reach this would eventually have.

In the Days of Our Resilience: December 2020 - May 2021, Book 4 in the Pandemic Poems Project, contains the poems that came out of the final season of the pandemic. They reveal our growing need for some kind of emergence from the dark cave of this interminable year. They rub their eyes in wonder at what comes next, what we’ll go back to, and what will be changed forever.

The Fire Pit Sessions, the video series of live online readings of the poems, got quite a bit sweatier, and a bit more fiery too. These have grown in popularity and can still be viewed on Nathan’s Facebook page: https: //www.facebook.com/chinacoman