Softcover
US $15.89 / UK £14.47
IndieBound / Bookshop.org / Amazon / Amazon UK / BookFinder.com

Hardcover, imagewrap (i.e. no slipcover)
US $28.00 / UK £20.19
available only through Blurb

Digital (PDF)
US $4.99 / UK £2.99
free to reviewers – contact me for a copy

The personal meets the political in this collection of experimental haibun (prose + haiku), drawn as much from dreams as from the all-too-real nightmares of an imperialist, carceral state in decline. Check out the Preview (full content) or scroll down for some film adaptations.

I self-published this because events were beginning to overtake it, and I was worried about it growing stale. Almost all of the haibun were written well before 2020 with its pandemic-related insanity and riots. If the economic downturn has left you broke, I’m happy to send along the PDF as long as you promise to publish a review or reaction at least 250 words long in a blog, on social media, or in any poetry-friendly online or print periodical. It doesn’t have to be a glowing review, merely an honest one. If it strikes me as fair and thoughtful, I’ll be sure to link back from here (and Facebook, Twitter, etc.).

I try to avoid didacticism in this book, so I don’t think you need to share my left-wing politics in order to enjoy it. There is a trigger warning for graphic descriptions of interrogation and torture in Part IV, “Human Resources”, which consists of erasure haibun from the CIA’s Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual.

“So many of these either burst my heart open or made me bust out laughing. His short haiku following the prose capture the essence of the piece. He has a sharp intellect, wide knowledge, and a wicked sense of humor.”
—Julene Tripp Weaver

“These haibun reflect ripples from Syria, Somalia, and Libya. And the orange-tinted flames of our own little corner of chaos. But Dave does not begin his collection with political concerns, at least not in the traditional sense. He begins from his front porch. … This may sound like a frightening journey, but it is worthwhile.”
—James Collins

“The erasure haibuns blew me away. The whole Sleeper Cell section was wonderful. Treat yourself! Because sometimes facing something difficult square is itself a weird kind of comfort.”
—Ren Powell

“A provocative syllabus of dark and funny haibun. These poems are such a dry wine.”
—Lesley Wheeler

“The image/word choices, the humor, the irony — the sense, also, of disaster and chaos — all work together well. And yes, timely.”
—Ann E. Michael

“A helluva read.”
—James Brush

Watch at Internet Archive

A 30-minute film comprising 33 of the 80 videohaiku I made in 2019, pulled together originally for REELpoetry/Houston TX in January 2020. My selection focused on variety of approach and what works best as videopoetry, not necessarily those with the most successful haiku. The complete cycle consists of four, seasonal sequences:

1. Winter Trees
2. Pennsylvania Spring
3. Summer in the UK
4. Autumn Metropolis

Here are the haiku selected for this distillation:

winter trees
the hobo is missing
one of his fingers

January
the shrinking circle
of my needs

snowflakes
on my bald head
tapping woodpecker

Groundhog Day
the former coal town living
off its shadow

walking the line
on both sides the same
light rime

a flutter of snowflakes
a flurry of snowbirds
an afterlife of seeds

no dark side of the moon
where a Chinese probe
is growing plants

winter sun
hoisting all its bristles
into the treetops

spider on the snow
the granularity of land
underfoot

shedding its snow
the new
old mountain

counting the rings
in the wood frog pond
another year

bee or not
the daffodils
keeping faith

wind flowers
the way Beethoven heard
an ode to joy

budburst time
the returned vet says he went
straight to the woods

spring rain
learning that Dad
has Parkinson’s

railroad ties
crowd the vanishing point
fiddleheads

red eft—
how salamandery
this path

this habit
of inhabiting hills
the ants and me

commuter train
all the fingers stroking
immobile phones

cows on the common
the universal language
of grief

jackdaw in residence
working with
found materials

dog walking
the slant rhymes
of our shadows

midnight snail
the twenty-six hundred teeth
of its tongue

British Museum
bury me with a bronze
selfie stick

steel band
the oil drums
that drive us

peace garden
the nonresistance
of leaves

churchyard labyrinth
zeroing in
on the X

skyline
the immensity
of our loss

wet sidewalk
beneath the fallen leaves
another sky

London after Blake
bearded hipsters open
a pop-up brothel

in this human city
an ash tree sings
possessed by starlings

November rain
a mouse forages
under the garden table

moon at the station
imagine belonging
to just one place