For the Record is a book-length poem whose word count is set to the number of lives lost to COVID-19 in Alberta, the author’s home province—which as of January 2026 sits at 7,113 people. Told in two parts, with each section recording real-time headlines, the book begins with the first COVID-related death of Cargill meat factory worker Hiep Bui. But the poem that cannot truly end does try to end with the hope embodied in the birth of Nisha Patel’s first nephew, weaving the overlapping narratives of life in precarious, unprecedented times with the bracketing of political negligence, Formula 1 racing, and gig work as an artist.

First performed to the Edmonton City Council as part of Patel’s tenure as Poet Laureate, the poem began at an enormous 615 words—since then it has grown as the number of lives lost to the pandemic continues to grow. Patel wants us to remember the ordinary days and the extraordinary grief, as well as the monumental potential for hope, care, and empathy in our communities that COVID-19 teaches us as we continue to live through the ongoing crisis borne of and from a mass pandemic.

Reviews

“This is not a time capsule, nor an archive, nor a memoir. While much of the world speaks of COVID-19 in the past tense, For the Record demands we reckon with the ongoing presence of the virus and the systemic injustices it lays bare. In this powerful work, Patel interweaves years’ worth of news headlines with the intimacies of the ill body, collapsing time and space in an urgent act of witnessing.”
—Jennifer Bowering Delisle, author of Stock

“Like a Formula 1 car ripping around the track at 350 km/hr, Nisha takes the reader on a poetic narrative journey that brings us back to the vestiges of 2020 COVID and into the present. These poems blur together just like how the grandstands would look to an F1 driver to give the reader a sense of despair over government inadequacy but also show the way that we move forward individually and as a community through trying times.”
—Conor Kerr, author of Beaver Hills Forever

“Nisha Patel’s For the Record meets the enormity of the historical present with grace and erudition and emotional clarity. The book asks, What is poetry in the face of a pandemic, in the face of climate disaster, in the face of genocide? For the Record is a record of a long and complex moment that we are fortunate to have now and will be fortunate to have in the future.”
—Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of The Idea of an Entire Life

“From piercing indictments of organized abandonment to tender elegies for her masi as the poet becomes one herself, Nisha Patel unfurls a sense of presence to our unending pandemic times. Her attention to the world is a welcome balm to the gleaming surfaces of colonial racial capital forcing us to forget; despite the speed of tragedy, this poem demands that we slow down and pay attention to love.”
—Jane Shi, author of echolalia echolalia

“Nisha Patel’s For the Record examines part of the COVID-19 pandemic with a journalist’s eye and a poet’s heart. Her poems amplify the stories of the marginalized and their struggles and tell the larger story of COVID-19 while weaving in her own personal health issues. For the Record is an example of the personal and the political beautifully intertwined.”
—Alexis Kienlen, poet, journalist, and novelist