Dear Vaccine: Global Voices Speak to the Pandemic

Dear Vaccine is both address and adoration for the medical breakthrough that has liberated much of the world from unending lockdowns. The City Books price INCLUDES a signed book plate by editors David Hassler and Tyler Meier, sales tax, and Media Mail shipping. The book’s bittersweet and sincere letter poems personalize the notion that, regardless of age, condition, or location, that which makes us human also makes us vulnerable. It is as if the virus knows where to find us: classrooms, coffee shops, theaters, even our own living rooms. In his letter to the life-saving drug, Sean Dennison writes, “Please accept our thanks in advance for lessons we did not know we needed to remember: touching a hand, seeing a beloved face, giving and receiving a true embrace.” Even the briefest of lines reflects how far many had drifted from life’s small pleasures only to pine for them once they were taken away. The frustration of airport security. The silence of museums. Broken into six sections–based on isolation, gratitude, grief, vaccine clinic, nostalgia, and possibility—the anthology encompasses the range of emotions we all experienced as the pandemic swept across the planet in waves. In Dear Vaccine, we are unified by loss yet comforted by science.