Petrarch, Dante, Shakespeare all wrote during times of quarantine and epidemic. So, too, have poets at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at the University of North Carolina Asheville. When Covid-19 precluded the many face-to-face gatherings that occurred prior to the shutdown, a group of seventeen OLLI poets with a passion to continue writing and sharing their work with fellow writers assembled online. They called themselves the Barricaded Bards.Each week one member selected a topic. On the basis of this prompt, poets wore a poem for that week on a wide variety of unusual, amusing, and challenging topics, now appearing in this collection.