Columbus poets

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.

Poet Jennifer Hambrick Featured in Columbus Monthly Magazine

~ Jennifer Hambrick ~ Leave a comment
The “Creative Space” column in Columbus Monthly magazine, April 2025. Story by Peter Tonguette, photography by Tim Johnson. This photo by Jennifer Hambrick.

I’m honored to be featured in the “Creative Space” column of this month’s issue of Columbus Monthly magazine. I’m especially honored to be the featured artist during April—National Poetry Month.

Written by veteran arts writer Peter Tonguette, the “Creative Space” column highlights the unexpected spaces where selected Columbus artists find inspiration while creating new work. As Tonguette wrote, I found creative and gustatory nourishment to complete a poetry commission at The Whitney House restaurant, in Worthington.

In 2019, Columbus’ Sunday at Central concert series commissioned me to write a new series of poems for a multidisciplinary performance of The Four Seasons by Antonio Vivaldi, featuring music, spoken-word poetry, and live-mixed digital art projections. The four violin concertos in The Four Seasons had been published in the 18th century in an edition containing four sonnets, one devoted to each of the four seasons of the year.

The poems I drafted at The Whitney House update the sonnets published with the concertos, exploring the seasons of contemporary relationships in a blend of nature imagery—a nod to the original sonnets—and images drawn from present-day urban experience.

Every work of art is a mixture of countless silent and invisible ingredients—years of training, hours and hours of deep thought, the magic of inspiration. The place where the artwork was made, the environment that nurtured the artist’s ideas into new expressions, is almost never mentioned in an artwork’s creation story. But now it’s part of the story. Columbus Monthly’s “Creative Space” column is a testament to the creative vibrancy of Columbus, where art is nurtured where you’d least expect it.

If walls could speak.

Deep thanks to Peter Tonguette for featuring me and to photographer Tim Johnson for working his magic.