The Leonids, by Hannah Rodabaugh

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

The Leonids reflects on the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, touching on everything from Long COVID to the trauma of losing loved ones to the claustrophobia of sheltering in place. Its short, fragmentary poems weave together snapshots of the author’s personal experiences with the larger state of the world, asking readers to grapple with the ways they may be culpable for how the social contract of collective empathy and care disintegrated during the pandemic.

The title was borrowed from the Leonid meteor shower, which appeared annually in the years preceding the pandemic, and from the mistaken belief that similar celestial events could foretell epidemics. Poems from the collection are part of Boise’s permanent historical archive on life during the pandemic.

Hannah Rodabaugh holds an MA from Miami University and an MFA from Naropa University. She is the author of Lost Cathedral (Cornerstone Press/University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point) and four chapbooks of poetry. Her work has been featured in The Indianapolis Review, Camas Magazine, Glassworks Magazine, and Berkeley Poetry Review. She is the recipient of a Literature Fellowship from the Idaho Commission on the Arts and has twice been an Artist-in-Residence for the National Park Service. She lives in Boise, Idaho, where she teaches at Boise State University and The College of Western Idaho.