By Darlene O’Dell Published by Yavanika Press Bangalore, India 2025, PDF download, 24 pages $3 USD minimum Ordering Information
In the summer of 2024, Darlene O’Dell wrote in her journal, “All my life, I walk down Main. No matter where I live or what state of mind I’m in … I walk the broken sidewalks of Main.” The Main Street found in this short collection (a baker’s dozen of haibun, tanka prose, short prose, and haiga) is one of “two rows of businesses” in western North Carolina, a region that was decimated by Hurricane Helene a month after O’Dell’s journal entry. (O’Dell herself was forcing her to evacuate for three months, an experience she recounted for the National Catholic Reporter ).
In Main Street, O’Dell recalls a mill-town street of slow charm, with a 5 & 10 store, a pharmacy selling cherry Cokes, a gospel radio station, and run-down Victorian houses. It’s populated by residents whose stories run deeper than what they show to the world. The owner of an appliance store who sells toasters and repairs refrigerators by day, but by night plays guitar to Merle Haggard records. The pharmacist’s assistant who once was a hub of gossip and, as a young woman, fell for an itinerant preacher. The 1929 college graduate who was a member of the campus literary and dramatic societies, but by the end of his life has a gin bottle sticking out of his coat pocket, cheeks “the red of a child too long in the cold,” and a secret in his closet. We also encounter the stories of her own mother and father and grandparents. O’Dell knows how to tell a story, and she adeptly captures the personalities and the poignancy of the street’s inhabitants.
Excerpt:
Ashes to Ashes
Her father not long dead, my mother begins to work at the Five and Dime. She is blonde and quite beautiful and will grow up to wear Audrey Hepburn hats, smoke Virginia Slims, and read Dorothy Parker, though she will hardly ever leave the mill town, nor escape the influence of the mill where her parents had worked as children.
She enjoys her afternoons at the dime store. Years later, her eyes sparkle if you ask her about it, and you want to ask her about it because she immediately transports you into a world of shiny red things, a place where white sprinkles cover raindrop chocolates and mix with the saltiness of popcorn in bags that crinkle just right. Swirling tops, yoyos, and games of Jacks for the taking, dolls with eyes that open and close, clipper ships sailing boldly across numbered canvases, pocket magnifying glasses … well, the better to see it all with. There is much to love in the dime store— and not a speck of dust.
I’ll fly away they sing at his funeral… a plastic white lily with a price tag on the stem blows in an unkind wind
Moonglow: Haibun & Haiga & Haiku
By Dian Duchin Reed Red Moon Press Winchester, Virginia 2025, paperback, 112 pages ISBN: 978-1-958408-72-8 $20 USD Ordering Information
“Don’t rush through life,” Dian Duchin Reed once recommended in an essay she wrote for The Nation. “Be aware of moments you can picture yourself later reminiscing about fondly, and then realize that you’re actually living them right now.” While reading this book, I kept picturing the author slowing down, appreciating the world around her, and often trying to make sense of it for us all. Throughout the book’s 38 haibun, she focuses on the often overlooked (a century-old cork oak tree growing amidst city traffic, opossum babies in her backyard, people who “are always kind and smiling”). She’s also not afraid to turn her attention to the world’s ills—homelessness, overconsumption, humanity’s self-absorption. With a philosopher’s mind and an artist’s eye, she captures specific details without losing sight of life’s larger themes, often adding a bit of humor to her musings. (Of the people who are always kind and smiling: “Clearly, they’re aliens visiting Earth … maybe they’re training for their planet’s Patience Olympics.”)
There’s a crisp directness in Reed’s writing, an approach that carries through the book’s 71 individual haiku and 30 haiga. The latter often contain unexpected connections between a single, simple image and a haiku, and careful thought has gone into their placement. Appearing throughout the book rather than in a single gallery, the haiga create additional resonances with the haibun or haiku on the facing pages (as shown with the excerpts presented below). This is a book that you won’t want to rush through.
Excerpts:
How We Got Here
Spun across space as star dust, as omnipotent motes, as the big bang’s cast dice. Rambling around the vastness like a hobo, like an empress, like Peregrine the Great. Then the overnight success: the right planet at the right time, wobbling around the right star. Seems like yesterday that cells joined and threw a party. Hasn’t ended yet. Dancing as the land shifts under us, and water rises, sinks, rises again. And again. Still the party continues. We cut irises for your vases, behold orioles through binoculars, provide cushions for our Airedales. Everyone—the irises, the orioles, the Airedales, and us—wears a party hat. Every breath the toot of a horn. Every sunset a reason to toast. Every birth a bright burst of confetti.
tearing down the old theater star dust
Mapping the Borderlands: Haibun and Tanka Prose
By Barbara Sabol Sheila-Na-Gig Editions Russell, Kentucky 2025, Paperback, 44 pages ISBN: 978-1-962405-15-7 $20 USD + $4.63 U.S. shipping Ordering Information
“To the wilderness and the wildness in us all,” reads the book’s dedication. Through more than two dozen haibun and tanka prose, Sabol seems intent on blurring thresholds—not just between humans and animals and the rest of the natural world, the wild and the “tamed,” but between moments that can suddenly change wildly themselves. She loses herself in a barn owl’s “almost human” shriek, tries to enter the white bear’s dreams through hibernation, offers an ode to the passenger pigeon. She also touches upon the dangers inherent in simple existence, a different kind of “wild life” where chance, “like a change in the weather, turns. So often out of the blue.” A tumble while hiking, an encounter with predators, a sudden shift in ocean currents that sends her kayak farther out to sea (until, “out of the blue,” dolphins arrive to nudge her back to shore).
In the book’s closing essay, “Animalia,” the author writes, “I am envious of people who have crossed the boundary between human and wild life, that line between our quotidian lives and the realm inhabited by wild animals—a kingdom that fascinates, mystifies, thrills, and sometimes terrifies us.” And also brings peace, as she recounts later in that essay when she describes a recurring dream: “I am walking a trail that runs alongside a clear stream… While aware that there are animals in these woods, I have no fear whatsoever. Then there comes a moment in the dream when I realize that this is the same path I’ve been trying to find again and again, one I walked as a child, and I am flooded with happiness.” In this book, Sabol helps us to re-imagine the mystery of wildness that surrounds—and inhabits—us all.
Excerpt:
Chimera
Trick of the light, I think, when the seal’s head crests in the water of this small cove where I’m swimming. A distance of ten strokes. Less. We keep that distance a long minute—me treading water, riveted. The seal dips, rises, turns a dark eye toward me. Curious, but not enough to come closer. On impulse, I swim out to where he last dove. Just sunlight there, spangling the water.
