Michael Stipe

Douglas Martin

Tom Gilroy

Grant Lee Phillips

The Haiku Year exists because seven friends made a pact to write haikus every day for a year as a way to keep in touch with each other. The finished product is a document of a year’s worth of moments filled with joy, sorrow and unexpected beauty. The book y creates the sense that present moments do not just disappear and provides a visceral understanding of how these moments fit into the context of the rest of our lives. The short verses in Haiku Year stab and elate. They hint at both the transcendence and mediocrity of everyday life. The power of Michael Stipe’s southern, twilight drenched lyrics from early REM albums is present in the volume. Douglas A. Martin’s sparse yet descriptive prose gleams throughout. The thoughtful storytelling of Grant Lee Phillips is pared down to the simplest words to describe an instance. The Haiku Year is about the appreciation of small moments of beauty, ultimately adding up to the appreciation and respect not only for our individual lives but for all the lives that intersect with ours. The Haiku Year effortlessly urges readers to enjoy details and to let spare moments pierce through the numbness of everyday routine.

The Haiku Year

A Practical Introduction

Book Design

In 2000, Douglas A. Martin burst onto the American literary scene with his sexy debut novel, Outline of My Lover. Following up with three more books, including Branwell, a novel of the Brontë brother, Martin has established himself as an acclaimed and distinctive American writer of the new century. His semi-autobiographical novel Once You Go Back is about growing up in a strained working-class household transplanted to the South. In his inimitably elliptical and evocative style, Martin carefully brings out the curiosity of children on the verge of becoming sexual, and their confusion in the midst of family violence.

Douglas Martin

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