Confined to the Sidelines: New and Selected Verses

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Confined to the Sidelines is a juxtaposition of the poems Jeff Nisker wrote in the time of COVID with four of his related social-justice poems. With this volume, Nisker hopes to imbue new compassion in health professionals, other health-policy makers and the general public, who all are or will be immersed in COVID's resulting diminishment of our health and social systems. COVID altered Nisker's life before he ever heard the word COVID, when he developed pneumonia from COVID in February 2020, two weeks before the world learned that a "virus of concern" had been rampant in Wuhan Province in China since Autumn 2019. Confined to the Sidelines is the only book in which Nisker's poems have remained as poems. His other creative writings have begun as poems, but have morphed into plays for wider engagement. Indeed several of his plays are but compilations of long prose poems, interwoven into a theatre format. Nisker decided the collection of poems in Confined to the Sidelines should remain poems because the concision of poetry is important in healthcare education due to the limited curricular minutes. Within these limits, poetry's precision can simultaneously unpack a topic and imbue compassion through a tightly-focused social-justice lens.