Books in Brief
Reviewed by Rich Youmans
Then and Now
By Lynn Edge
Red Moon Press
Winchester, Virginia
2025, paperback, 90 pages
ISBN: 978-1-958408-67-4
$20 USD
Ordering Information
Lynn Edge writes haibun in a direct voice, her sentences plain and true and well-hewn, her haiku offering quiet moments that resonate deeply. Like her earlier book of haibun (2022’s Unsaddled), Then and Now shares stories from Edge’s family history and her native Texas, where for nearly six decades she’s lived in the small farming and ranching community of Tivoli. The book’s 24 haibun (complemented by a dozen standalone haiku) are divided into two sections that echo the book’s title. The first, “Then,” contains 11 haibun that recount memories from earlier in Edge’s life. Here, she introduces many of her family members, starting with a grandfather who grew up in a log cabin and “never said more than a few words, other than grace at the table,” and a grandmother who related tales of a time when Jesse James roamed the countryside. The second section, “Now,” brings the reader into the author’s more recent years. Edge memorializes her late husband, who “set a corner post that would take three men to lift … boned out venison hindquarters with the skill of an artist,” and “could quiet our newborn daughter.” She also touches on community, friendship, and resilience in the face of life’s challenges, from winter storms to broken heating units. Mostly what comes through is an appreciation of the ties that bind us to one another, past and present.
The book concludes with a shortened version of her “Featured Writer” essay that appeared in cho 20.3. That essay includes the full text of “Year of the Farrier,” Edge’s first attempt at fictional haibun (and which was selected for the 2024 Best Small Fictions anthology).
Two excerpts, one from each section:
Genes
When I was in the seventh grade, my mother forced me to attend a sock hop and bought me a pink taffeta dress for the occasion. I faced going alone as an object of my mother’s shiny, unfulfilled dreams. Daddy, caught between a demanding wife and an insecure child, leaned down and said, “Your great-grandmother was a Cherokee princess. You look like a princess tonight. Go to please your mother.”
Decades later, my children took tests from Ancestry.com and there was no Native American DNA. But I still believe.
night of stars
my daughter’s dark hair
streaked with silver
Remembered
Today, I received a card entitled “A Caring Wish” from my local church. It is bright yellow with dandelion clocks drawn in iridescent blue.
I have not attended church since my husband’s death. At first, I was sick, and when I felt better, Covid raged. Yet, I am touched to read the signatures of almost every one of the thirty church members. The last two names are in block print as even the youngest children signed.
depth of winter
my late husband's Bible
more worn than mine
One More Thing Without You
By Joshua Michael Stewart
Buttonhook Press
An imprint of OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters (O:JA&L)
2025, digital (PDF), 90 pages
Available for Free Download
The 17 haibun and tanka prose in this collection range from accounts of hikes in central Massachusetts (and encounters with bears) to reflections on milk snakes, a Buddhist-influenced meditation on acceptance, and a heartbreaking tale of losing a child. The author of several previous books of mostly narrative poetry, Stewart knows how to tell a story—one of his haibun, “Psithurism,” was selected for the 2025 Best Small Fictions anthology—and his work deftly mixes thoughtful, surprising, and occasionally melancholic observations. (The book’s title is taken from his haibun “Meditations with Dead Hornets, but also Wild Birds,” where he mentions a woman “with dark hair and sunken eyes” whom he has not seen in years.) The haibun range from long, haiku- or tanka-studded descriptions of his hiking experiences, where nature and civilization form an uneasy (and often broken) truce, to single paragraphs capped by a poem. For me, the best haibun in the book are among these shorter pieces, where his knack for detail and natural storytelling skills engage the reader immediately, and the concluding poem creates a satisfying, lingering resonance.
Two excerpts, the opening haibun and closing tanka prose:
Psithurism
Once, when I was four, my brother snoring in the bunk above, I crept out of bed and padded past my parents’ room, down the basement stairs—both hands on the rail, and stepped out the back door, snow crunching under my footy pajamas, and except for wind in the trees: silence—no one to call me stupid or yell at me for not eating lima beans, and there, in the backyard, I looked up at the moon, and no one, not my parents, my brother, not a lover confided in years later, knew I walked away that night and never returned.
december rain
a blue jay blooms
in tree after tree
To Life
To the cat, I’m no more than a stepladder—a tool for looking out the window. From here on the bed, I see a scribble of branches, the occasional flash of bird, and the dusty underside of drawn-up blinds. The cat reports on ground activity. His chatters indicate the robin’s return. His yowls announce that the calico next-door is all belly and paws in a patch of sun. Today, there are no big questions I’ll ask or try to answer. Instead, I’ll fold my hands on my chest, and tap a finger along to my neighbor’s hammer as he pounds something beautiful and strong to life.
sundown
sunrise
a butterfly
opens and closes
its wings