Akbar, Kaveh, ed. The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on the Divine. 2022. London: Penguin Books, 2023.
I enjoy Akbar’s own work, and I am very interested in the intersection of literature and religion, and I am obsessed with Penguin paperbacks, so when I came across this book while browsing at the Strand recently, of course I decided to buy it immediately.
Banwarth, Francine. Bare Necessities: Selected Haiku. Taylorville, IL: Brooks Books, 2024.
In recent years, Brooks Books has been publishing a number of Selected Poems volumes for haiku poets that have had long writing careers. This is an important archiving effort that I appreciate on a personal level because it helps me get a better sense of the genre’s history. I bought Banwarth’s book as part of my ongoing attempt to learn this history.
Daniel Shank Cruz 