no matter how it ends a bluebird’s song

Winner of the Rattle Chapbook Prize & Winner of The Haiku Foundation's Touchstone Distinguished Book Award. Signed copies are available from the author.

In no matter how it ends a bluebird’s song, Kat Lehmann stipples a journey from sickness through healing using a variety of contemporary English-Language Haiku (ELH) structures and styles. The poems explore the upheaval of a sudden affliction, the search for answers, and navigation between hopelessness and hopefulness, with expressions of loss, faith, mortality, and deep gratitude. The disjunction of images creates a space in which the wordless can reside to build poems that are more expansive than their diminutive size suggests. Boundaries of the self are blurred and thinned to embody an ocean, a tree, a cloud, or a flower. A selection of jisei considers the trailing shadow of death, followed by a morning in which the night is shaken from one’s wings. A number of single-line poems (including the title poem) contain more than one break in syntax to express multiple, or even opposite, overlapping facets of an experience. Is the bluebird there or not there as we deconstruct the self and journey back to it?

Layout and Design by Timothy Green. Cover art by Rachel Bingaman.

From the Author

I became ill experiencing sudden and severe side effects with nothing to do but hope for time’s restoration. Writing these haiku became a means of journaling, documentation, expression, and healing. The narrative utilizes a range of contemporary haiku sub-genres and structures, including single-line haiku (traditional in Japanese), concrete haiku, tercets, and what I call “beautiful monsters” without name. Some of the poems use seemingly impossible language to convey a real experience. Haiku, as a minimalistic art form, invites the reader to be an active participant in the poem’s unfolding. For those new and not-new to contemporary haiku, I hope you enjoy the collaboration.


Praise for no matter …

Lehmann’s ‘no matter how it ends a bluebird’s song’ encourages readers to stretch their imagination. Truly a joy to discover the way each poem arrives and unravels. Readers can look forward to discovering the narrative throughlines that braid these poems together.
—Mark Danowsky, editor-in-chief of ONE ART: a journal of poetry

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