There is a centuries-old Japanese form of writing called the haibun: meditative narratives ending with a haiku that acts as a summary or extension of the ideas and moods in the prose. In Accidental Gardens, Rob Carney both honours this form and gives it an update for the 21st century. These 42 essays - arranged into sections titled 'Environmental Studies', 'Wine Is Rain in Translation', 'Seven Seeds', and 'Raccoon Verses' - are all short and end, haibun-style, with poems or encapsulating images. These essays are impressed by the natural world, and unimpressed by politics. They are lessons on poetic craft, and poetic themselves. They are at home in the American West but aware of the whole earth, all its landscapes and animals and magic - but also its fragility.
There is a centuries-old Japanese form of writing called the haibun: meditative narratives ending with a haiku that acts as a summary or extension of the ideas and moods in the prose. In Accidental Gardens, Rob Carney both honours this form and gives it an update for the 21st century. These 42 essays - arranged into sections titled 'Environmental Studies', 'Wine Is Rain in Translation', 'Seven Seeds', and 'Raccoon Verses' - are all short and end, haibun-style, with poems or encapsulating images. These essays are impressed by the natural world, and unimpressed by politics. They are lessons on poetic craft, and poetic themselves. They are at home in the American West but aware of the whole earth, all its landscapes and animals and magic - but also its fragility.
‘Accidental Gardens’ will be released with a range of traditional trade reviews (Books + Publishing, Australian Book Review) as well as environmental literary platforms (Black Mountain, Emergence, Terrain, The Ecologist). In addition, Stormbird Press will coordinate Facebook Love Events before and on e the eve of the launch, promoting readers to purchase though indie booksellers. An In-Conversation event will be held through Zoom, followed by a series of international reading and reader interaction sessions through Zoom. The title will be heavily promoted through the launch period to 3,500+ Stormbird Community Reading List.
Rob Carney is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Facts and Figures (Hoot 'n' Waddle, 2020), and The Book of Sharks (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), which was a finalist for the 2019 Washington State Book Award. In 2014 he received the Robinson Jeffers/Tor House Foundation Award for Poetry. His work has appeared in Cave Wall, The American Journal of Poetry, and many others, as well as the Norton anthology Flash Fiction Forward (2006). He is a Professor of English at Utah Valley University and writes a regular feature called 'Old Roads, New Stories' for Terrain.org.
With his clarity, directness and humour, Rob Carney writes like Richard Brautigan in an age of ecological collapse. This collection of flash essays and poems is a journey through the absurdity, tragedy and black comedy of late-stage capitalist and consumerist America, weaving between despair and hope like sixty million spawning salmon. It is also a map that points us towards how the damage might be repaired—a reminder to open our eyes and to pay attention. —Nick Hunt, author of Where the Wild Winds Are and Editor at The Dark Mountain Project
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