“I started writing a collection of haikus on April 8, 2020, almost a month after New York City became a Level Four COVID zone. Writing haikus, I decided, would be like exercise, something to accompany my isometrics in the morning. One haiku per day—that was the rule. Having exhausted the lyric to the point of lushness in my last book, The Crazy Bunch, a book that arrived like fire, I decided to give myself the same challenge that Gwendolyn Brooks gave to Etheridge Knight: write haiku as a way of exercising brevity and control over my line. I was certain that routine would help me though the feeling of confinement, unfreedom, which was compounded by fear, uncertainty, dystopian threat, burnings cities, improvised morgues, deserted streets, and the end of hanging out as I knew it. I wrote these to the pandemic, to the moment, to the headline, to the fear of contagion, the wellness suggestions among the older brothers in my group chats, family preservation, the unknowing, the unfreedom, and wondering if we were about to enter the final days of love.”
—Willie Perdomo