Coronavirus Haiku

Coronavirus Haiku, edited by Mark Nowak, delivers harrowing snapshots of COVID life from the perspective of New York’s essential workers. Among the 13 poets whose work is featured in this anthology—all of them members of the Worker Writers School—are restaurant workers, nannies, and taxi cab drivers. In these poems, eerily empty Manhattan streets give way to tense subway rides and television news plays over exhausted meals after 12-hour shifts. Each poet brings a different emotional register—Estabon Chimilio’s haiku is confessional, and dark: “COVID train riding / My nerves shaking like the rails. / Can’t wait to leap off,” while Alando McIntyre relies on comic poise to evoke the ennui of quarantine: “homelife and worklife / blend kinda rough like mi green / juice, drink but don’t taste.”

The poets in this anthology exercise numerous haiku traditions, drawing on seasonal indicators and onomatopoeic exclamations, and on haiku’s radical, politically charged strains. Nimfa Despabiladeras moves between monumental devastation―from the overburdened morgues to the violence surrounding the election―and the poignancy of the mundane: “Boiling water / At 6:00 a.m., I realize that / my bird clock is dead.” Thomas Barzey’s COVID-survivor haikus read like the tapped messages of a prisoner: “Afraid to go out / Cannot let anyone know me / Please hide me.” Alfreda Small imbues her fragments with tonal complexity: “Cashier adds up food / Really tired of people / Tulips blooming outside.” 

There is notable documentarian value here, as portraits of worker’s lives, of the pandemic, and of New York City. As with any historically themed anthology, some poems risk losing resonance once this moment has passed, and it’s interesting to see different poets tackle contextualizing their work in such short space. The results are often poems that speak to more deeply entrenched social issues that have only been exacerbated by the pandemic.