Essential Haiku Volume 20

"In classical haiku, one of the most constrained poetic forms, monkeys and herons and trees and the moon can stand in for the entire world. The best of these tiny poems can be at once specific and timeless, questioning and assertive, funny and sad." - Sarah Manguso, The Week

American readers have been fascinated, since their exposure to Japanese culture late in the nineteenth century, with the brief Japanese poem called the hokku or haiku. The seventeen-syllable form is rooted in a Japanese ...