Rich Youmans

Books in Brief

On the Way to Man in Moon Passage

By Ruth Holzer
Published by Dancing Girl Press
Chicago, Illinois
2025, paperback, 27 pages
$10 USD
Ordering Information 

This chapbook’s 20 haibun offer glimpses into the author’s youthful, rambling sojourns through Britain and Ireland. They begin in the English village of Melton, in a “topsy-turvy” cottage, where “the windows were set at crazy angles and had to be hammered shut,” and proceed from there to stops in the suburbs of London, Stratford-upon-Avon, and then London itself, where she registers at the UK’s old Aliens Office. From there she seems to live peripatetically in increasingly reduced circumstances, with excursions into Wales (“the land of song”) and Ireland.

Although the author never explicitly says when they took place, the adventures she recounts are those of a young woman. Her accommodations range from houses and B&Bs to a hostel, a barn, and, after missing a bus back to London, an outdoor bench. Those she meets along the way include a cabbie who once knew T.E. Lawrence, a drunk who harangues his fellow passengers on a London bus, and a French girl—a fellow hitchhiker who is also traveling alone— with whom she shares weapons of choice. (“I flicked open my switchblade for her and she showed me her loaded pistol.”)

Holzer occasionally offers observations of some natural surroundings (a royal stag outside London, wagtails, skylarks, and spring lambs in Wales), local landmarks (cathedrals, castles), and tranquil moments (tea and homemade bread while visiting a relative of her London landlady). Mostly, though, she recounts episodes from a time in life when every day can bring a new adventure—high, low, or sometimes both. (After a day spent watching performances of Shakespearean plays, she’s awoken in the middle of the night by the rattling of someone trying to break into her room.) It’s also a time when wanderlust runs strongest. “As soon as I arrive in one place I want to leave and head on down the road to the next … I might see something interesting and make delightful discoveries,” she muses at one point. “Or maybe it will be very much like where I just was.” In the end, these haibun poignantly show how both can be true.

Excerpts:

Up Against the Wall

Every night there’s a party in the bar of the Munster Hotel—Corkmen as well as tourists—bonded in the brotherhood of beer and music. Rebel songs and romantic airs compete with the crash of pinball machines and the races blaring on TV. Soon there’s a bottle broken against a table, a chair smashed to smithereens, women screaming.

gray sunrise
fiddle and tin whistle
a last lament

Facilis Descensus Averno

(“The descent to hell is easy” ... Virgil, Aeneid 6:126)

In the beginning, the city offered pleasures one could never tire of, without being tired of life itself, as has been said. I enjoyed museums, theater, concerts, dining in fancy restaurants, staying in expensive hotels. Then I moved into somewhat smaller quarters, with a scrap of breakfast included. Then an attic grudgingly let by a genteel widow in reduced circumstances. Then a series of anonymous bedsits, with barely enough space to crouch by the gas fire. Then a basement room, the smell of rising damp, water boiled on a hotplate, week-old bread from the corner shop. Smoking, dreaming, hallucinating.

Man in Moon Passage
a sooty draft
from this doorway

Dreaminations: Prose Poems

By Jianqing Zheng
Pubished by Madville Publishing
Lake Dallas, Texas
79 pages, paperback and e-book, January 2026
ISBN, paperback: 978-1-963695-49-6
ISBN, e-book: 978-1-963695-50-2
Price: $19.95 paperback, $9.99 e-book
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In John Zheng’s newest book, the “prose poems” consist entirely of haibun and tanka prose (52 haibun and 14 tanka prose, to be exact), which are divided among four untitled sections. The first two sections seem to be mostly observations of nature, meditations on identity and the Mississippi Delta region (where he’s lived for three decades), and accounts of family episodes and memories. In many of these pieces, Zheng writes about moments that, while not momentous in themselves, are immediately recognizable and relatable—an outing with his wife where he ends up singing a blues song to her, a pain that leaves his arms like “brittle branches unable to bend,” instances where malapropisms elicit both laughter and groans.

The third section focuses more on his professional life as a teacher (he’s a professor of English at Mississippi Valley State University). Most of the pieces reveal what could be called the underside of academia—bullying, administrative arrogance, the constant threat of student grievances. There are also a few that touch upon a range of characters—from cartoon icons Popeye and Olive Oyl (one of Zheng’s rare forays into dreamlike surrealism) to the famous poets and writers whose works he teaches. The last group includes the regional writers who found in Mississippi “fertile soil” for their imaginations. Zheng is among them; as he notes, every writer has a sense of place in their heart … this sense has haunted my mind for modes of expression about life in the Delta, about mapping myself.” An avid photographer as well as a writer, he seems to travel widely throughout the region, ever-ready to stop for a “snap” of a historic gravestone, an antique sign, or vine-covered mansion of old.

Zheng’s travels also extend beyond his adopted home state, and the last section is devoted to these journeys. Here, not just his photographer’s eye but all his senses are on display, providing sharp details in short, direct prose—the scent of pineapples like “relaxing piano music” on the Hawaiian island of O’ahu, the oppressive “mini heat dome” of Nevada’s Death Valley, and the faded blooms that “looked like crepe paper” in Japan’s Yatsu Rose Garden.

Excerpts:

Old Field Road Sign, Mount Locust, Mississippi

The engraved sign shows a young woman with a basket in her hand walking down the road, her long skirt swaying like sunlight rustling with shriveled leaves. Is she taking lunch to her husband harvesting cotton or going berry picking in the woods?

fall solitude
spanish moss hangs
from live oaks

I follow her to the cemetery. A white marble obelisk, standing there like a historic landmark, reveals her name and dates of birth and death. She’s been at rest since 1849. I take a snapshot of her and pace back to the parking lot. Footsteps echo the long past.

empty dusk
a split-rail fence
zigzags

A Stay Against Confusion

Sipping a cup of oolong for relaxation, I stretch my legs and accidentally knock a stack of books off the tea table. I guess they need a break as well, so I let them lie listless on the floor, one’s head on the other’s chest, the other two leaning back to back with lowered heads, the rest like toppled dominoes, and the one I’ve paged the whole afternoon snoring gently.

spiritless wind
sunlight swings slightly
with sheer curtains
my Russian Blue
twitches her tail

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