Jim Nisbet was an internationally known novelist, essayist, and poet whose groundbreaking noir fiction has cult followings in the U.S. and abroad. The poems collected here were written and distributed to his email list during the Covid- 19 pandemic. Like much of Nisbet's work, these poems are written in diction both stark and elevated, alternately tender, fierce, sweet, frightening - and always keenly aware of human frailty in the face of the unknown. Informed both by classical tradition and the immediate circumstances of the pandemic, these poems deal in matters political, spiritual, and cultural - but ultimately take the shape of an increasingly personal encounter with the phantasms of the pandemic. Taken together, The Plague Ditties form a poetic diary of uncommon artistic, historic, and metaphysical resonance.