HCshohyôran

Wondrous Instruction and Advice from Global Poets: How to Write and Publish Moving Poems and Books and Publicize Like a Pro by Charlotte Digregorio (Artful Communicators Press, 2025) Published by  Artful Communicators Press, 2025 (5th printing) ISBN : 978-0-9912139-2-4 Order from eBay, or by mail , $34.20 U.S. Reviewed by Pearl Pirie The title is quite a mouthful, out of the tradition of self-publishing of get it all there on the cover. Charlotte Digregorio is one of our Haiku Canada cohort members living in the U.S.  You probably know her from her busy blog, Charlotte Digregorio's Writer's Blog  where she has posted poems of haiku and tanka by many people worldwide for 16 years. She has marketed and/or published 55 titles on all manner of topics, including Haiku and Senryu: A Simple Guide for All in 2014 and  Checkout Time is Soon: More Death Awareness Haiku with Robert Epstein in 2018. There are of course many books on marketing books and on how to write haiku...

  Mossy Alley by Shannon Wallace ( Island of Wak-Wak , 2025) ISBN: 978-91-990469-0-7, , $27.50 (Amazon) Review by Pearl Pirie Mossy Alley is  a 60-page book as one unit without sections. It is  haiga, in the sense of illustrations, paired with haiku or senryu but the text isn’t superimposed on the images. As a reader, I tend to overlook images in books, but these drawing, collages, photos and paintings, are more emotive and communicative like Arshile Gorky  than decorative. The author, Shannon-Wallace, is Canadian-American. The book is printed by a Swedish press, Island of Wak-Wak, umder the imprint of Forests Unexplored . This press is not devoted to haiku, but a general poetry press. It is always sweet to see haiku appealing to the wider market as did Weather by Rob Taylor (Gaspereau Press, 2024). The back cover astutely points out that it is not only the collage that collages. Capturing moments “that when taped together as a collage reveal what it i...