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.
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.
