Sometimes reading can help you escape.

Rich Osborne knows that as well as anyone.

He is on the front lines of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic as a Patient Transport Coordinator at Lehigh Valley Hospital Network.

During the shutdown, he wrote his first novel, “The Poetry Man,” available on the Amazon Kindle Store and in paperback.

Osborne also did the book’s cover artwork and photography.

“It was a way for me to cope,” says the Coplay resident in an email interview.

“I wanted a positive mindset, to refocus it on a world free of this crisis,” he adds.

“Poetry Man” takes readers away from today’s problems with the romance of Michael and Felicia. Unlike in many novels, the tragedy takes place before the book opens, with Michael’s divorce and the death of Felicia’s husband. The story is how the couple builds a new life together.

The book’s introduction, “How Can Love Be So Perfect?,” might be taken as a concise summary of the plot.

“It just developed that way,” says Osborne. “The characters are very positive with a great relationship. They just started to develop and flow.”

Osborne says that the story involves Michael and Felicia “meeting, becoming friends, getting rid of the obstacles preventing that friendship from blossoming into love, and reminders of each other’s past lives, with a supporting cast and how they not only have their own lives but fit into Michael and Felicia’s life.”

The characters are original, but many are based on people that Osborne has known:

“Many of the places in the book are places I have either lived or spent some time in.”

A poem weaves throughout the book, written by The Poetry Man.

Osborne has been writing poetry since he was eight-years-old.

He says the book is not about “princes and princesses, or beautiful people getting together,” but has people that might make you say, “Hey, I know that guy from somewhere.”

While he was writing the book, he read portions of it to coworkers and listened to their feedback.

Osborne was inspired by his grandmother, who lived next door to a public library and used to read to him.

She was the first to recognize his hearing loss and have him checked when he was two-years-old in Woodbridge Township, N.J.

Osborne was born with a 65 percent hearing loss in both ears. He was fitted with hearing aids, which were more cumbersome in his day and led him to feel rejected at school. Nature and literature became a refuge.

There are themes in “The Poetry Man” that relate to his first, nonfiction book, “How to Be Positive, Manifesting Your Dreams and Discovering Your True Self.”

Both books, he says, deal with “overcoming setbacks, lack of self-esteem and fear of failure by re-channeling the efforts to create a positive outcome.”

Osborne went back to school when he was nearly 40-years-old and graduated from New Jersey’s Caldwell College.

At one time he had a landscaping business, did technical writing for scientists working on fuel cells for the space shuttle, and did public speaking as a representative of the New Jersey Employer Council.

“If you speak from your heart, people will listen,” he says.

Osborne plans for the novel be the first in a “Poetry Man” series, continuing events in the life of Michael and Felicia. He sums up the book thusly:

“I was able to transcend my energies into a beautiful love story where people could actually reach out and touch one another again. They could travel, go out to dinner, attend celebrations, make new friends and just enjoy life.

“I saw when I was writing ‘The Poetry Man’ as a book, that even if you were isolating, you could rediscover the good things in life like romance.”