Brad Bennett — Touchstone Distinguished Books Award 2025

Brad Bennett is the recipient of a Touchstone Distinguished Books Award for 2024 for the volume a rush of doves Winchester, VA: Red Moon Press , 2025).

Commentary from the Panel:

Brad Bennett’s new book,  a rush of doves,  rejects numbered pagination and the more conventional organization of seasonal order. This serves the reader’s own pathfinding, following clouds and clusters of haiku that link or contrast. Yet, from the first haiku, we receive a welcome, a ritual of setting out, like the hiker sleeping over in a lodge before hiking the Appalachian Trail:

sunlit moss
a sit-a-while bench
in the silver maples

As in the separation phase of a rite of passage, we are drawn into a liminal space of contemplation where the self is suspended. We are initiated through words: sunlit/ sit/silver. Words are guides to seeing.  Bennett proves the haiku moment may be a deeply entangled in words, words caught in all their “thingliness”. Zen-like skepticism hovers around words in haiku. Eric Amman’s influential “The Wordless Poem” (1969) quotes Alan Watts: “if we compare the haiku to most Western poetry… the haiku poet seems to avoid words rather than display them”. But in Bennett’s haiku the discovery of the right word is as much an “aha!” moment as the perception itself. Bennett savors discovering words like polished stones, but always in service to a nuanced perception– the incremental shifts in light, density, and texture that measure out impermanence:

the ombre
of waxwings
mist to drizzle

early summer
a barred owl’s leap
before unfurling

Sometimes the perception of impermanence arises through an entanglement of sound and syntax, or synesthesia, as in this haiku where the tensions created by a split-second slippage allows “brown” to become a noun, “fall” a verb, so we see/hear both warblers and wind simultaneously:

the new brown
of fall warblers
wind in the oaks

In other haiku, we hear the entanglement of the natural object with its environing season through connecting textures inside words: “pluck”,”silk”,”dusk”:

plucking silk
from ears of corn
autumn dusk

or feel the way the casual hand driven path of a can opener intersects with the annual path of the sun:

solstice supper
the slow path
of the can opener.

The tactile vividness of the moment is conducted through the static electricity of words. Dailiness is enlivened and the cycle of samsara is shared as a casual, but deeply felt communion.
Bennet’s book privileges true haiku over senryu, but brings us subtly from the natural into the human world in disarming ways, tuning the reader’s ear to discover the same wonder of a forest floor in a disheveled bed:

thunderstorm
bunched up sheets
at the bottom of the bed

or to discover our own estrangement from each other in awakening neighborliness:

park bench
a stranger
becomes someone

Bennett shows a relaxed confidence that words, like the birder’s guide or binoculars, can serve as tools, not distractions. While I have focused on one of several tones and registers in this multifarious book, it impresses with its range and surprise. When the occasion demands a sudden shift into an austere white writing, words are stripped to skeleton:

y axis to x axis all day snow

This book’s great strength is its fusion of deep knowledge of the natural world with the sensory skill to sing into it—to make language sound out the nuances of the world and our impermanence.

Bruce H. Feingold

Distinguished Books Award Coordinator

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See the complete list of winners of both Individual Poem Awards and Distinguished Books Awards in the Touchstone Archives.