John Okrent is a poet and a family doctor. His poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Plume, Poetry Northwest, Field, and The Seattle Times, among other journals. He was chosen by Carl Phillips as the winner of the 2021 Jeff Marks Memorial Prize. Okrent works at a community health center in Tacoma, WA, where he lives with his wife and two young children in a fisherman's cabin on Puget Sound.

Books by John Okrent:

Other poems on the web by John Okrent:
Five poems
"Barrows Goldeneye"
Two poems
"April 12, 2020"

John Okrent's Website.

About This Costly Season:

"John Okrent is a poet of caretaking. This Costly Season is a book that will help us begin again in the pandemic's wake. More than any book I have read this year, this book of poems uses the poetic line to test out, and find, versions of the new truths by which we find ourselves living."
—Katie Peterson

"This Costly Season is a defining poetry collection for our now ineluctable experience of plague. Like Petrarch, Keats, and Whitman, whose influence undertows these poems, Okrent is a poet who explores the metaphysics of mortality under pressure."
—Erin Belieu

"These are the most heartbreaking and delicate poems about the pandemic, about human frailty, and the opposite of that frailty, that I have ever experienced. They are Okrent's elegies and odes to a profoundly dangerous time in history that doesn't want to go away. This is a miracle collection and each one of these poems is a long slow kiss into the face of oblivion as they slam it to the dirt and kick its ass."
—Matthew Lippman

"The miracle of this collection is the love of the speaker for every aspect of life, including its final days. This sequence seems like a prayer, the prayer of one who feels blessed by life on earth."
—John Skoyles