Description

A literal and metaphorical groundbreaker, this unique and indispensable collection contains a brilliant array of haiku by five members of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, including founder and guiding spirit Lenard D. Moore, who serves as its editor. In the deft hands of Gideon Young, Sheila Smith McKoy, Crystal Simone Smith, and L. Theresa Church, we find strands of lyrical precision intertwined with earthy and treasured mundanities against a backdrop of emotionally transporting moments. Long before ecocriticism and ecopoetics entered their current vogue state, Moore shattereed preconceptions by exploring the connections between Japanese and African American aesthetics. In this volume, we see his extraordinary skill as a revelatory poet in dialogue with four gifted writers who have been nurtured by his example and become literary leaders in their own right.
—Lauri Ramey, co-editor of Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures