Haiku Society of America

Haiku Society of America

Merit Books Awards for 2026
for books published in 2025

Michael Henry Lee and Michele Root-Bernstein, judges
judges' comments to be published in Frogpond then on the web site

 

First Place

Lee Gurga. The Whisper I Wished For. Champaign, Il: Modern Haiku Press, 2025.

First Place goes to a challenging, rewarding book that reflects a master poet’s transition from “normative” to “experimental” haiku. Gurga breaks his poetic journey into four parts, each headed by an informing epigraph about Japanese aesthetics or cognitive poetics.  What results is a highly original organization of haiku. Initial explorations of unusual seasonal juxtapositions slowly give way to the defamiliarization of experience and the prolongation of perception. Throughout, Gurga excels at joining abstractions to the concrete and sensual. He takes risks with form, content and expression. His themes range widely over love, marriage, aging, gun control, violence, gender, language, myth, the sacred. Sensitive, intelligent, incisive, tender—The Whisper I Wished For is a tour de force.

            seed catalogue
            a confession
            of faith           

            mirror mirror      a pair of wings

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Second Place

Gary Hotham. Our Backs to the Wind. Taylorville, Il: Brooks Books, 2025.

Brooks Books has been regularly producing lifetime collections of haiku by “American exemplars” of the art. The selected work of Gary Hotham makes an excellent addition to the series. Since 1966, he has maintained a high standard of output, with regular flashes of haiku genius. To read through his poetry chronologically is to realize just how radical and  innovative his work has been over the years in terms of lineation, spacing and simplicity of words and form.  His exceptionally original haiku lean on daily life and momentary awe, returning again and again to wring the essence from certain compelling imagery—the fog, the sea, the dark, the stars. Contemplative, fresh, intuitive.

            fog.
            sitting here  
            without the mountains      (1976)
 
                deeper into daylight
            sounds the ocean makes
                         out of land                  (2023)

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Third Place Tie

Chuck Brickley. Downhill Home. Ormskirk, Great Britain: Snapshot Press, 2025

Downhill Home is an artfully designed, adept collection of 111 haiku and senryu that deal with some of the most seminal issues of the day. As a former resident of San Francisco and British Columbia now currently residing in Daly City, California, Brickley has drawn from each location to produce a rich tapestry of work treating the subjects of love, hope, death and the environment, all lightly interwoven with a feeling of amity for each place in time. Ranging from contemporary to more daring forms of expression, he writes most compellingly as an everyman, one fully attuned to inner and outer weathers.

            stifling heat
            the stillness of sneakers
            flung on a wire

            left one sprinkler on one Earth left

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Third Place Tie

Kat Lehmann. No Matter How It Ends a Bluebird’s Song. Studio City, CA: Rattle Foundation, 2025.

No Matter How It Ends a Bluebird’s Song is a masterful collection of 81 poems divided into nine sections of nine poems each. In numerology, the number nine represents the end of a cycle, it embodies completeness or wholeness, the end of one phase of life and the beginning of another. That meaning wholly informs Lehmann’s fascinating chronicle of her struggle with an unnamed illness which affected both mind and body and seemed to elude effective treatment. From cover to cover the collection elicits a range of deep seated emotions, as you can’t help but feel an overwhelming empathy for her struggle. 

            torn vein
            I make a Pollock
            of the sheets

            the doctor shrugs nothing he can     for me withering wind

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Honorable Mentions (not ranked but in alphabetical order by author)

Vandana Pardashar. A Call’s Loon. Taylorville, IL: Brooks Books, 2025

Fifty-six poems by Vandana Parashar are poignant in tone and subject matter, all of which come from a distinctively heartfelt voice. A Call’s Loon stands out for its honest, concise look at marriage, motherhood, and divorce—the haiku seem to grow edgier in keeping with the journey.

            that first week
            either the baby cries
            or I do

            rearranging itself around me patriarchy

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Julie Schwerin. Fencing With the Moon. Georgetown, KY: Finishing Line Press, 2025
 
With suminagashi artwork by the poet marking 11 sections of poems, this collection takes a prismatic look at essential rhythms of womanhood—fertility, childbearing, menopause—and all too often accompanying vulnerabilities.  As far as crafting a thematic narrative in verse, it doesn’t get much better than this.

            her troubled past . . .
                  jars of sea glass
               on the windowsill

            after changing my default settings

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Hilary Tann. Timbre. Winchester, VA: Red Moon Press, 2025
 
The haiku in this posthumous book represent a life well-lived in uncommon observation. Lovingly edited by a number of prominent poets, the collection provides the best of Tann’s work from 1997 through 2019. Tann was a composer of secular and sacred music by profession and those haiku evoking sound and silence, churches and other ethereal spaces are especially fine.

            school windows     
            generations            
            of scotch tape

            quietly
            we become
            audience

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Rick Tarquinio. A Handful of Huckleberries. NP: odd duck press, 2025

For over 30 years, Tarquinio has proven himself in full command of the bucolic tradition in English-language haiku. His poetic expression is consistently fresh; his use of contemporary form unusually resonant, with enough wordplay, insight, and allusion to delight anew the nature lover in us all.

            a lady slipper
                sunlight
                     fits

            windhymn
            a blowdown pine
            becomes a pew

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HAIBUN BOOK AWARDS:

First Place

Margaret Chula. Clothes to Go Out In. Portland, OR: The Poetry Box, 2025
 
Clothes To Go Out In contains 44 outstanding haibun that are mesmerizing in their capacity to capture a myriad of sights, smells, tastes and emotions. Chula’s limpid use of normative haibun form is equally engrossing. Focusing on clothes worn for occasions great and small, she draws out what they reveal, what they conceal. In addition, she links haibun to haibun in renga-like associational leaps of thought and sensibility that surprise and delight. The whole adds up to a life of singular moments distilled to synthetic essence. Simply outstanding.

from “Clothes To Go Out In”

My father who cared nothing for clothes, was embalmed at the funeral home and laid out in his coffin dressed in a dark suit with a light blue shirt and perfectly-knotted tie. Still, his second wife was upset. “Where are his glasses? He doesn’t look right without his glasses.”
. . .

            how easily
            the snake sheds its skin     
            then disappears

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Second Place

Roberta Beary. Crazy Bitches. Winston-Salem, NC: MacZ, 2025

Beary has spent the past 20 years stretching the limits of haibun. Here they compile some 80 haibun written since 2004 into a provocative mélange of memoir and imagination, biography and story, fact and fiction. With supple style and flashes of brilliance, they probe relationships, family secrets and related distress with haibun prose that consistently surprises, consistently upends expected form, consistently anchors in grounded and grounding haiku. Separately, each piece persuades; altogether they articulate both admirable advocacy and admirable artistic purpose. A stellar achievement.

from “The Story of the Woman in the Poster”

Virginia* turns on the gas lamp as dusk settles on cobblestones. She moves to her window-seat, watches the fairies dancing in the blue flame. She doesn’t question what she sees.
. . .
 
            riverwalk—
            the white space
            between words
 
*Virgina Woolf

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Third Place

Reid Hepworth. The Improbability of Sea Monkeys. Chennai, India: Kavya-Adisakrit, 2025

Hepworth’s The Improbability of Sea Monkeys offers an evocative collection of haiku and haibun that succeeds on at least three levels. It is a deeply personal chronicle of a young girl growing up in the 60s and 70s coming to terms with her sexual identity. Historically anyone who lived in that time period will surely appreciate the numerous references shaping the era. The quality of work is superior in its simple, honest integrity and concrete imagery that is a joy to read.

“Bend”

She cried when told she couldn’t pee standing up. The unfairness of it. All the little hurts rolled into one, like cuts doused in antiseptic.
 
            to school
            again

            in a pink frilly dress . . .
            square peg

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Honorable Mention

Glenn G. Coats. A Lantern on the Bridge. Carolina Shores, NC: Pineola Publishing, 2025

Coats returns to the river where he grew up, meditating on parental illness and death, and salient moments of the past. The first three sections of the book feature haiku, the last two haibun. This mixing of forms is handled with commendable skill. When read together, the titles of each section create a haiku. The prose maintains the same short lines and rhythms as the poetry. Haiku and haibun, equally, are given to fresh expression of imagery, to intriguing reticence, and to quiet insight.

from “A Train Crossing the Prairie”
. . .

            and in that sweet cocoon
            of darkness,
            you want to tell her
            what happened
            and almost do
            but not yet.

                        the deer within an arm’s length dusk

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COLLABORATIVE VERSE AWARDS:

Best

John Thompson and Renée Owen. Moonblind. Sebastopol, CA: Pig Blossom Press, 2025

In long-standing collaboration, Thompson and Owen have forged a shared voice of notable distinction, co-composing rengay into sensitive meditations on nature and human nature. Moonblind stands out for their deft handling of renku-inspired links between haiku and for simultaneous thematic developments within each rengay. Add to this the physical beauty of the book, printed on high-quality paper, saddle-stitched by hand with waxed thread, and covered in hand-made papers, indigo-dyed. Altogether, this chapbook is an epitome of illusive resonance and quiet excellence.

From “Bits of Shell and Ship,” the opening haiku:

a bag of fruit
by the driftwood fence
our budding friendship                        (Thompson)

       on the incoming tide
       a message hidden in a bottle        (Owen)

~ ~ ~

Honorable Mention

Nicholas Klacsanzky, Hifsa Ashraf and Jacob D. Salzer. Beyond Emptiness. NP: A Lulu Publication, 2025

This book successfully tackles a subject that is difficult for its illusory nature. Three poets collaboratively explore mystical grounds long associated with haiku, across differing religious practices—Zen (Klacsanzky), Sufism (Ashraf) and the spiritual sensibility located in “Mother Earth and the Great Mystery” (Salzer).  Each page features three haiku, one from each poet, that speak to one another in probing, often unexpected ways and make for an intriguing and inspiring collection.

            scent of blackberries
            more and more
            words disappear             (Klacsanzky)

            beyond
            this emptines . . .
            thawing river                 (Ashraf)

            river mist..
            the faint whispers
            of a lost prophet             (Salzer)

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HAIKU ANTHOLOGY AWARDS:

Best, Tie

Johnnie Johnson Hafernik, ed in chief. Best of Geppo, The Haiku Work-Study Journal of Yuki Teikei Haiku Society. San Jose, CA: Yuki Teikei Haiku Society, 2025

In celebration of the 50th anniversary of YTHS, this collection compiles “top vote-getting poems” from issues of its work-study guide, Geppo, from 1978-2024. Conceived in part as a kukai, in which members submitted poems for member appreciation and voting, the “best of Geppo” reads like an historical anthology of change in English-language haiku over the last half century. YTHS was founded in traditional Japanese haiku aesthetics, yet one sees a rather abrupt shift in the 1990s from 5-7-5 syllabic form to freestyle haiku—as voiced by a long list of poets now recognized as leaders in the field. The editors’ presentation is simple and to the point. The high-quality poems speak for themselves.

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Best, Tie

Lee Gurga & Scott Metz, eds. Haiku 21.2, An Anthology of Contemporary English-language Haiku. Champaign, IL: Modern Haiku Press, 2025.

The second installment in the 21st century anthology of “notable” haiku by thoughtful and daring editors. Whereas Haiku 21 covered 2000-2010, H21.2 attends to the years 2011-2020, thus offering a totally new selection of open, allusive, challenging haiku that run the gamut from concrete to abstract expression, contemporary to avant-garde form. For those who wonder what else can haiku be, look no further for fresh use of conventional imagery and new amalgams of minimalist disjunction. H21.2 is chock-full of poetic energy and innovation.

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Honorable Mention

Terry Ann Carter & Lynne Jambor, eds. Uncharted Territory, 2024 Seabeck Haiku Getaway Anthology. Bellevue, WA: Haiku Northwest Press, 2025

What sets this anthology apart is the appealing presentation of Seabeck conference activities and materials. Haiku, haibun, rengay, and artwork all fold into the conference theme of maps. One gets the impression that the lot was actually generated at Seabeck. The result is a haikai anthology that holds together beautifully as a collection in its own right.

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SPECIAL COMMENDATION:

Two prose entries do not a contest make, but we wish to commend the two books received in this category for offering inspiration to both ends of the haiku spectrum.

Charlotte Digregorio’s Wondrous Instruction and Advice from Global Poets (Winnetka, IL: Artful Communications Press, 2025) encourages would-be haiku poets and those in the early stages of their apprenticeship to the form.

Haiku, Language, Thought (Champaign, IL: Modern Haiku Press, 2025) by Richard Gilbert provides aesthetic basis for the innovative haiku of many of today’s masters. First published as Poetry as Consciousness (Keibunsha, 2018), Gilbert’s ground-breaking treatise tied for First Place in the Merit Book Award for Prose in 2019. This edition includes an additional 110 example haiku—and makes an important book readily available in the U.S.

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About Our 2026 Judges:

Michael Henry Lee.
 
Michele Root-Bernstein

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