avant-garde haiku

Poetry Collection ‘a silence or two’ wins Merit Book Award

~ Jennifer Hambrick ~ 2 Comments

I am extremely honored and humbled that my most recent book, a silence or two (Red Moon Press), has received a 2025 Merit Book Award from the Haiku Society of America.

According to the Haiku Society of America, the HSA Merit Book Awards “recognize the best haiku and related books published in a given year in the English language.”

a silence or two is a deeply intimate poetic statement. It is raw, visceral. It deals with subject matter at once personal and universal—the body and it failings, trauma, death, loss, identity, and ultimately, the state of fractured wholeness so deep a part of our shared humanity in a broken world. This collection manifests in imagery and narratives that transcend the “objective realism” common to haiku to explore precarious terrain—namely the often unvoiced emotions hidden where flesh, soul, and spirit intersect in the depths of embodiment—for which expected languaging and usual modes of discourse are often insufficient.

Rattle poetry journal editor Tim Green and I discuss a silence or two extensively on Rattlecast.

It is significant that the emotional journey of this collection unfolds in haiku and short prose poems. Haiku tends to be viewed by poets and non-poets as a sort of toss-off genre unworthy of the kind of deep and rigorous study poets and literary scholars routinely devote to other genres. This common misconception and others, however, overlook centuries of profound and profoundly moving poetry in haiku’s original Japanese traditions and in the more recent though vibrant English-language tradition, to which the likes of Richard Wright, Sonia Sanchez, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and Jane Hirshfield have made significant contributions.

Common misconceptions about haiku also fail to consider that, like all other artistic genres and mediums, haiku invites exploration and the expansion of expressive possibilities. Indeed, haiku is a poetic vehicle uniquely and powerfully suited for conveying extraordinary ways of seeing the world and giving voice to the limitless depths of human emotion.

On every page of a silence or two, I broke the cardinal rules of English-language haiku and pushed other boundaries in ways that some would see as taboo. I am hugely gratified that HSA Merit Book Award competition judges Scott Mason and Patricia Machmiller saw the value of those risks for this book as a work of art and for the genre of haiku in English more broadly.

My deepest thanks and a deep bow to them. Deep thanks also to Jim Kacian and Red Moon Press for publishing this collection.

A Conversation with Rattle Poetry Journal Editor Tim Green on Rattlecast

~ Jennifer Hambrick ~ Leave a comment

I had the great honor and pleasure recently to join Tim Green, editor of Rattle poetry journal, as featured guest poet on his livestream, Rattlecast.

Tim and I had a really fun genre-bending conversation about poetry, music, and how music and my work as a classical musician, broadcaster, and cultural journalist informs my work as a poet – and vice versa. We also talked about how my work with music – and my mysterious poetry guardian angel – helped me become a poet in the first place. And I read from my most recent poetry collection, a silence or two.

Our conversation about words and music took place just before the publication of Rattle #85, which features a Tribute to Musicians, in which my poem “My Daddy Was an Appalachian Folksong” appears.

When I write poetry, I aim to make music with words. I spend a good deal of each day thinking and writing about music and considering how the sounds of words and the shapes of phrases and sentences can add up to vibrant writing that dances on the page and rattles in the mind’s ear.

The rhetoric of the physical body here is not strictly metaphorical. Poetry and music offer us powerfully embodied experiences as they work on and in us. We feel certain ways when we experience poems and music, and those feelings are emotional and physical.

I’ve always been fascinated by the sounds and feel of words, and also by how those sounds and feelings have come to mean what they mean. I was the kid who wondered, Gee, why do we call the sky “sky?” How did those particular letters and those particular sounds come to signify the great big blue expanse overhead? And how did “blue” come to signify the color of sky? Why not call it something else? And why call toes “toes?” Why call buttons “buttons?”

Of course, we can trace etymologies and find at least some of the ancestors of the words we speak and write today. But if I were to be teleported back in time and given the opportunity to meet the first person who ever spoke the proto-word that became “sky” or “toe” or “button,” I would ask him or her, What made you think to call this thing by these sounds?

Deep thanks to Tim Green for giving words space to dance and sing in the pages of Rattle, and for inviting me to share some of my words on Rattlecast.

Announcing the arrival of a silence or two

~ Jennifer Hambrick ~ Leave a comment

I am extremely excited to announce the publication of my most recent poetry collection, a silence or two, by Red Moon Press.

Hailed as “a stunning collection … destined to become a haiku classic,” a silence or two mines the territory of loss, healing, transformation, and joy in haiku and short prose poems that take the haiku form and narrativity between genres into new expressive ground.

Read advance praise for a silence or two from Cherie Hunter Day, Dr. Richard Gilbert, and Michelle Tennison and check out my other books on the Books page. You can also purchase copies from there (click on the book cover images) and through the Order page.

My deepest gratitude to Jim Kacian, founder and president of The Haiku Foundation and publisher at Red Moon Press, for guiding this collection into the world with such patience and care.

Inaugural Heliosparrow Frontier Awards Honor Cutting-Edge Poetry

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Photo: via Wikimedia Commons Lisa Mastino, CC BY-SA 4.0

I’m humbled to have received four First Prize honors, three Honorable Mentions, and a Special Award for haiku recently in the inaugural Heliosparrow Haiku Frontier Awards.

All of the awarded poems and the judges’ fascinating and extremely rich commentary on them are published in Helioparrow Poetry Journal and in the flipbook at this link.

The awards were created by Dr. Richard Gilbert, professor emeritus of English, Kumamoto University, and one of the world’s leading theorists and critics of contemporary English-language haiku, “to present and praise leading-edge poems and poets illuminating inspiring directions in haiku poetics.”

All of the poems under consideration for the Frontier Awards were published in Heliosparrow Poetry Journal – the world’s leading publication of avant-garde English-language haiku and poems in related genres – which Gilbert founded and edits.

Gilbert, Heliosparrow co-editor Clayton Beach, and poet Michelle Tennison served as judges for the haiku, alterku (poems that expand the haiku form), sequence/collaborative poem, and short poem categories in the contest. I was also honored to judge the haibun category, and to join Gilbert, Beach, and Tennison in judging the alterku and sequence/collaborative poem categories, in which my own work was not in the running.

Far from traditional haiku rooted in the seasons of the non-human natural world, the poems recognized in the inaugural Heliosparrow Haiku Frontier Awards reinterpret the traditional haiku form through daring language, startling imagery, bold disposition on the page, and challenging subject matter and psychological nuance.

To read these poems is to look into the future of English-language haiku.