Fuck Isolation

Book excerpt: This tribute to the poets was born in March 2020, during the beginning weeks of California's stay-at-home orders for the COVID-19 pandemic. Poets Underground, a community of poets who perform weekly at Amplified Ale Works Acid Vault room in San Diego, continued to meet online, expressing their raw emotions and hardships in lockdown. The intense missing of in-person connections led to the coining of the catch phrase and title of this anthology. Divided into five sections, each dealing with different phases of the challenges the pandemic created, this volume features 134 poems from 72 poets. With shifts in the political and the emotional since April, these poems reflect only the first month of lockdown, and life in the world post-COVID-19.