Around the Ides of March in 2020, it became clear that Rome would never be the same.
These have grown in popularity and can still be viewed on Nathan\'s Facebook page: https: //www.facebook.com/chinacoman.
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.
They rub their eyes in wonder at what comes next, what we\'ll go back to, and what will be changed forever.
They reveal our growing need for some kind of emergence from the dark cave of this interminable year.
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.
I couldn\'t have imagined the effect and reach this would eventually have.
But that "idea" has turned out to be the saving grace of my year, and career.
And what I owe them, I haven\'t quite calculated yet.
I mention their names because the concept for this project-of writing commissioned poems for a donation of some kind-was their idea.
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. or maybe July.
But when I wrote the check for my half of the next house payment, I knew what hell awaited me come June...
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.
One by one, the lights went out in the city of my career, and income.
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.
Around the Ides of March in 2020, it became clear that Rome would never be the same
