world without end by chloe cocking

in March 2020, we decided that we would each write one poem a day for every day in April 2020 in honour of national poetry month. you may recall that period was considered the height of the lockdown in many places in north america– no one out on the streets, no one travelling to work or school. i stayed inside, along with my person and my cat, in a very tiny apartment. i worked from home. i had zoom meetings. i played scrabble with my person. (cat dislikes playing scrabble, so i knew it was pointless to ask her to join in). i banged on pots and pans every night at 7 pm in support of front-line workers who were risking their lives to keep the rest of us fed and as healthy as possible. along the way, i wrote 30 poems in 30 days. some are very obviously “covid poems”. others are poems written during covid (rather than poems about covid). as i have worked on assembling this collection, i notice that all the poems have certainly impacted by the stillness, quiet, and terrifying peacefulness of those weeks. what bubbles to the surface when you coop up a poet during a pandemic? they think about things, drilling deeper ever deeper into themselves. this book contains some of the results.