Books in Brief

Just Enough Moon

By John Budan
2023, paperback, 62 pages
ISBN: 978-1-365402-30-2
$10 U.S.
Self-published, 55 pages
Available from Lulu.com, Amazon, and other online booksellers

Just Enough Moon offers 52 of John Budan’s published haibun (his total to date, based on the book’s subtitle), and they take the reader on a wide-ranging ramble through the author’s world and imagination. Most of the haibun follow the same format—one or two paragraphs followed by a single haiku that subtly resonates—and they offer a mix of what are (presumably) Budan’s own experiences and what are obviously fictional works. A writer of flash stories, Budan is not afraid to take on a persona, male or female, and his narrators include a child in rural Mississippi, a nursing-home resident who claims to be the real Wheezer (of Little Rascals fame), and a middle-aged woman longing to be appreciated. The collection covers a lot of territory, geographical and otherwise. Budan takes us to out-of-the ordinary events, such as the La Femme Magnifique Drag Queen Pageant and the Sugar Creek Rosting Crowing Contest; to his Wisconsin hometown and a high school reunion, where he reflects on his growing up; to encounters in a Parisian bar and a San Francisco poetry reading. (Budan was a former merchant marine stationed in that latter city, and several of the haibun reflect his apparent fondness for Beat poets.) He also introduces us to characters on the margins of society—migrant workers in a humid vineyard, a woman sentenced to life in prison—portraying them with tenderness. Using concrete images and direct language, Buden offers moments that are sometimes humorous, sometimes poignant, and sometimes both.

Excerpt:

Memory Loss

They are twins and were the best of friends, until twenty years ago. They had been drinking late in a local bar when my uncle started to criticize my father’s favorite actor. When he claimed that Al Pacino mumbled, my father stormed out and since then both have been too stubborn to resume the 60-year bond they had. Through the were neighbors, they never spoke to each other again.

My father does not have much longer to live. When I enter the intensive care unit, I see my frail uncle hunched at the foot of the bed. He has tears in his eyes. My father stares intently but does not appear to recognize him. My uncle says he has come to apologize for criticizing somebody in the movies. He can’t remember if it was Al Pacino or Robert de Niro. He says he always got those two mixed up.

last visitor
a nurse
turns off lights

Pressing Matters: Haiku, Senryu and Haibun Poems

By Caroline Giles Banks
Published by Wellington-Giles Press
2023, paperback, 84 pages
ISBN: 978-0-9645254-9-8
$12.00 U.S.
Available from the author as well as Amazon and other online booksellers

As the Caroline Giles Banks notes in her introduction, the poems in Pressing Matters were written between 2020 and 2022—that cataclysmic period of pandemic, climate change, war, and social unrest. Containing nearly 100 haiku and senryu (including three sequences) and 17 haibun, the book is divided into three sections. The first section addresses environmental issues—the haibun touch on such topics as our dependence on fossil fuels, drought, and rising temperatures, while also raising questions about the treatment of indigenous cultures. The second section goes further into issues of war, racism, religious intolerance, oppression—how, as human beings, we treat one another. The last section, as Banks explains, contains poems not only about the COVID-19 pandemic, but also “aging, illness, and death”—the types of pressing matters that have always been with us. The haibun are heartfelt, with their haiku or senryu spanning a range of styles: some rely on wordplay and puns for their effect (“snowpack almost depleted / don’t dam it / damn it,” “the Rio Grande / trickles down / to a misnomer”), others present images that condense eons into a few words (“First Nations’ / prehistoric pictographs / high-water marks”). All, as Banks says, “concern what it means to be human in a time of profound change and uncertainty.”

An Excerpt:

Words Beyond Wars

War tramples Kyiv culture.
The art museum’s windows are blown out.
The concert hall is shrouded in dust.
The statue of Taras Shevchenko, lauded poet,
is pitted and pocked by bullets. Dead silence.
These images beg my imagination
for color, for sound, this pen.

ringing the base
of the bell tower
sprouts of green grass

Electric Cat City: A Poesy

By Anna Cates
Published by Red Moon Press
2023, paperback, 98 pages
ISBN: 978-1-958408-19-3
$20.00 U.S.
Ordering Information

Cates’s latest work—a mix of standalone haiku and tanka, a few sequences, and three dozen haibun and tanka prose—offers a walk along shadowy paths, where you don’t have to go far before you run into the stuff of nightmares: demons, witches, mythic creatures of folklore and fantasy. In the haibun and tanka prose, she sometimes seems to be channeling the Grimm Brothers; other times she inhabits the spirit of Lewis Carroll and even Isaac Asimov and his robots. The settings range from Victorian England to Nazi Germany to modern-day Ukraine (Vladimir Putin makes an appearance). Only a few times does Cates veer from her forays into the macabre and the evils of existence, and they become particularly memorable for their rarity. In one haibun, an elegy for her mother, who ” died the Fourth of July, a week shy of her seventy-seventh birthday, the raspberries ripe along the bike trail behind the hospital, the mulberries just beginning to turn …,” she offers a haiku with a haunting image (in the best sense of the word) that reminds us of the things we need to value: “only for a moment. . .black butterfly.”

An Excerpt:

Some Shun the Word

Wicked. For fear of God, some shun the word. You ride it like a broom. You circle the moon each dreary October, while glistening thunder booms. You scratch out spells with a stick, eyes and voice smokey as a hex. Unsexed, your tone faded jade like a granny smith apple, you dazzle. You sizzle, jazzy to dizzy … You came from a land of darkness. You crept from a grove of shadows, a place of dying and disorder, where light is midnight — Circe’s pet, last of your league.

a black rat
nibbling at a rotten pumpkin
owl calls

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