Roberta Beary — Touchstone Distinguished Books Honorable Mention 2025

Roberta Beary  is the recipient of a Touchstone Distinguished Books Honorable Mention for 2025 for the volume crazy bitches.  (Winston-Salem, NC: MacQ Books, 2025).

Commentary from the Panel:

The poet and essayist Maggie Nelson complains in her “The Art of Cruelty” that, while the media offers men a wide spectrum of hero-models to measure their aggression and rage by, the media mostly offers women female heroes who either turn their rage inward or become monstrous. Beary, a flawless carver of faceted haiku, has perfected haibun as an instrument for probing female rage and resistance within the coils of family romance.

In a kind of feminist intervention, Beary places a protagonist named “Susan” in the all-male world of the gun-slinging T.V. hit Bonanza and makes her an unsuspected, silent killer:

“They say that the rancher’s killer could only be an outsider… She lifts her sewing scissors and drains the basin. Her delicate hands carefully close the window. Now that the smell of bleach is all but gone.

pine casket
the benediction of
black-eye susans.”

(“At the Ponderosa with Susan”)

Likewise, Beary has pushed the haibun toward a radical exposure of sexual abuse:

“how when we close our eyes, the bedroom door softly opens and a husky voice whispers. not asleep yet, are we?

leaky sunshine
a spiderweb fills the hole
in the canopy.”

(“Symbiotic Attraction”)

These haibun also offer a thick description of gender fluidity and desire outside heteronormative fault lines:

“A secret my brother knows is that I like kissing my best friend Esme who dresses in boy clothes…” (“Dad Says”).

Bringing the fine-honed dramatic skill of a short-story writer, and the rhetorical and formal variety of a lyric poet, Beary’s prose is always charged with variety and surprise. The titles alone show the imaginative and verbal energy: “Grief: the Uncut Version”; “Johnny Angel’s Last Dance (Up on the Rooftop); ”Longitude and Lassitude”.

In “The Super Power of Lipstick”, women battle over a dead mother’s body the way male warriors in The Iliad battle over the corpse of Sarpedon. “Lipstick” becomes the “weapon” as daughter and aunt vie to define and claim the dead mother:

“open casket
the unnatural blush
of her lips.”

True to the image-based concreteness of the best haiku prose, Beary builds a portrait layer by layer:

“Mom said peekaboo pink was perfect for bridge at the clubhouse. Deep-dive pink was perfect for lounging by the pool. Bubble-gum pink was perfect for watching Law & Order reruns in her condo, with the AC off.”

And here the haiku clinches the satire of a certain species of American decadence with a devasting interrogation:

“empty unit
sunlight warms the windowsill
starfish.”

Beary’s prose captures a conversational American idiom with the minimalism of writers like Chuck Pahlaniuk or Lauren Groff, but also toggles between cultures, shifting subtlety into Irish diction and vocabulary. In each case, the haibun have velocity and laser focus. Style serves suspense and delivery.

Beary also plays with genre and form, veering from immersive first-person confessions— “Right before my husband tells a lie, he touches the tip of his nose with his index finger…” (“The Art of Communication”)— to persona poems, to stylized epistolary pieces (“Dear Nancy Drew”), to fractured fairytales, such as “There Was an Old Woman” : “People think nursery rhymes are a way to lull newborns to sleep. But try telling that to the old woman in the giant shoe…”. The dispassionate compression and insistence of their style is most effective when they expose violence under the cover of religion and conformity:

“A footprint marks his face. His white shirt is stained with blood. But the Blessed Heart insignia on his backpack is untouched.

purple crepe myrtle the wasps come calling.”

(“On a Day Like Any Other”)

The personal poems expand into wider indictments of cruelty and sexual exploitation across cultures and institutions. Cumulatively, the haibun create a daunting cosmology of generational trauma redeemed by hard-won knowledge, wit, and moments of grace where momentary streaks of light break in:

curlew song
all the way home
the circular path

(“Rosemary for Remembrance”)

Throughout this collection, intrigue is built into the constant slippage between autobiography and imagination, emotional exposure and firm verbal control. Beary is one of the editors of the recent Haibun: A Writer’s Guide, and in this collection they make each element of the haibun support the others: title, prose, haiku, all honed with craft and dynamic interactivity.

Bruce H. Feingold

Distinguished Books Award Coordinator

THF strives to maintain a safe and friendly environment for our readers and site participants. Participation in our offerings assumes respectful and appropriate behavior of all parties. We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone, for any reason, at any time. 

If you see something you feel may violate our Code of Conduct, please report it to the appropriate moderator or the President here.

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