Lockdown Letters & Other Poems

Opening with a response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Lockdown Letters & Other Poems ranges near and far in the authors catalogue. While spared the devastating effects of the disease, he offers a view of the way daily life changes and new risks are confronted as people try to maintain routines. The book shifts to work inspired by travel -- local, global, and beyond -- routes giving rise to memorable observations and insights. More place poems and a cycle of sports pieces round out the volume, with its theme of home-and-away.

Paul Marion (b. 1954) is the author of Union River: Poems and Sketches (2017) and editor of Jack Kerouacs early writing, Atop an Underwood (1999). His book Mill Power (2014) documents the twentieth-century revival of the iconic factory city where he was born, Lowell, Massachusetts. With Tina Neylon and John Wooding, he edited Atlantic Currents: Connecting Cork and Lowell (2020), featuring writers from Ireland and America. His recent work has appeared in So It Goes, the journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum & Library in Indiana; Café Review in Portland, Maine; PoetsReadingtheNews.org, a national online publication; SpoKe Seven, a Boston-based poetry annual; Résonance, a Franco-American journal at UMaine Orono; and Merrimack Valley Magazine. With his wife, Rosemary Noon, he lives on a high hill in Amesbury, Mass., in sight of the seacoast and uplands of New Hampshire and Maine.