Book-of-the-Week

Book of the Week: Senka

devries_senkacoverCarrow de Vries invented his genre to fill a need: with seemingly no form that combined the open emotionality of tanka and the pithy humor of senryu, he created it. This undated and self-published book chapbook gathers what he felt were the best of them, and while the strict syllable count surely dates them (from the 1960s and ’70s), their broad humor feels timeless.

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

Do you have a chapbook published 2009 or earlier you would like featured as a Book of the Week? Contact us for details.

Haiku featured in the Book of the Week Archive are selected by Jim Kacian, following a concept first explored by Tom Clausen, and are used with permission.


When we were younger
we sat real close together
to feel each other.
Now, we still sit the same way,
but just to hear us better.


Me superstitious!
’Coursse not! Don’t be a damn fool.
I could never be:
yet, every morning I read
the day’s doing for Cancer.


The snow birds have gone,
winging their way to the North,
the cracker birds stay.
The county folk are glad, but
even now some get plastered.


I was a farm girl.
Went to Chicago to work.
Stayed twenty five years,
but every year come April
I filled my bath tub with dirt.


Atheist Vergil
gets rid of a persistent
Christian Minister.
Says, I must tell you I am
Unitarian.


This crowd is noisy
as a clattering of teal
as we hike inland,,
but ah I am so quiet
because you are not with us.

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