Book of the Week – one-line twos by Kala Ramesh & Marlene Mountain

A collaborative poem asks for trust. A collaborative haiku sequence asks for something even rarer. It asks two poets to relinquish ownership while remaining unmistakably themselves.

That is the achievement of one-line twos. Written over several months in 2015 by Kala Ramesh in India and Marlene Mountain in the United States, the collection consists of sixteen sequences of alternating one-line haiku. The poets deliberately imposed very few rules on themselves. They exchanged the poems, but, as Kala Ramesh tells us in her introduction, they “wrote about many other things… on everything but the verse we’d just offered.” The result is a shared current of thought that continually surprises both writers and readers.

The book is also an important exploration of the one-line haiku. Each poem invites the eye to break the line differently with every reading, allowing meanings to shift and regroup. Reading becomes an active collaboration.

One of the opening poems immediately demonstrates this fluidity:

morning village hazy cows in different postures (p. 6)

The line has no prescribed pause. Does “morning” modify the village or the cows? Does the haze belong to the landscape or to perception itself? The uncertainty is not a puzzle to solve but part of the poem’s vitality. The village gradually comes into focus, much like our eyes adjust to early-morning light.

The collection moves effortlessly between the personal and the political:

where kidnapped raped married killed a world of girls (p. 7)

The absence of punctuation forces the reader to confront each verb without relief. There is no rhetorical flourish, only an accumulation of violence. The compression gives the poem its urgency. One line becomes an indictment of an entire social reality.

Elsewhere, philosophy enters almost playfully:

basho rebelled was rebelled against how neat is that (p. 8)

This delightful poem reminds us that literary traditions remain alive precisely because they are questioned. Bashō becomes not an untouchable master but a poet whose own innovations invited future departures. The line speaks equally to haiku history and to contemporary practice.

Nature, too, is continually renewed:

three-fourths of the himalayas unseen my fear (p. 12)

The unseen mountain becomes an inward landscape. Fear occupies the same vastness as the hidden peaks. The poem suggests that what remains invisible often shapes us more profoundly than what we can see.

Perhaps my favourite line in the collection is this:

from emptiness comes form says the buddha in the heart sutra (p. 17)

Rather than merely quoting Buddhist philosophy, the poem enacts it. Out of a single uninterrupted line emerge multiple rhythms and meanings. Form quite literally arises from apparent emptiness as the reader discovers where to breathe.

Johannes S. H. Bjerg, in his afterword, observes that these poems embrace everything from birds and flowers to politics, racism, power cuts, and women’s rights. That breadth is one of the collection’s greatest strengths. It reminds us that contemporary haiku need not retreat into a carefully curated version of nature. It can engage fully with the world we inhabit.

As you read these sequences, try reading each one-line haiku aloud several times, placing the pauses differently each time. Which version feels most convincing? And does the poem change when your breath changes?

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You can read the entire collection in the THF Digital Library.

The THF Digital Library can now also be found easily through the carousel on the home page, making it simpler than ever to discover books, journals, and other treasures from the archive.

Do you have a full-length or chapbook-length book published in 2021 or earlier that you would like featured as a Book of the Week? Contact us for details. Book of the Week selections are made by THF Digital Librarian Vidya Premkumar and are featured with permission.