The Book of the Week – Changing Demographics by Philomene Kocher & Marco Fraticelli

Changing Demographics is a collaborative work that feels like two minds learning how to move together without losing their distinct rhythms. Built on the septenga form, a sequence of linked haiku, the book unfolds as a slow conversation where one poem leans into the next without fully resolving it.

The opening section, “Spaces,” establishes distance and relation at once:

the first robin
flies from a cedar
to the power line

The movement is simple, but it draws a line between the natural and the constructed. The bird does not belong entirely to either. It travels between them, as the poems do.

A few pages later, a shift in scale:

long train ride
the space between the clouds
becomes wider

Here, distance expands inward. The landscape is not what changes; perception does. Time stretches, and with it, awareness.

In “Solitude,” the poems turn toward interior spaces:

crossing the kitchen
feeling the warmth
of the sunlit floor

The moment is almost domestic to the point of invisibility. Yet the body registers it. Warmth becomes a form of presence. Nothing dramatic occurs, but something is received.

Later, in “Intersections,” the outer and inner meet more explicitly:

I consider changing jobs
a dragonfly lands
on my shoulder

The decision is suspended. The dragonfly does not resolve anything. It interrupts or perhaps redirects. The poem holds that pause without pushing it forward.

The title section brings the theme into sharper focus:

changing demographics
ads for incontinence wear
on the city bus

The shift here is social, even collective. Ageing is not private. It appears in public spaces, in language, in what is marketed and made visible. The poem does not comment. It lets the reader sit with recognition.

Throughout the book, the alternation between two-line and three-line haiku creates a rhythm of compression and release. One voice condenses, the other opens. Over time, this pattern begins to feel like breathing.

There is also an undercurrent of ageing and disappearance:

my remaining days measured
in pills

and elsewhere,

the house gone
just the lane
and a field of hay

What remains is not always what was central. The poems return, again and again, to what is left behind, what continues, what quietly alters shape.

Toward the end, you may begin to notice how the poems resist closure. Even before arrival, they shift. They ask you to stay with the movement rather than look for an endpoint.

As you read, pause for a moment and notice which lines feel like continuations and which feel like departures. Do you read them as two separate voices, or as a single unfolding consciousness?

Perhaps that is where the book settles. Not in resolution, but in relation.

You can read the full book in the THF Digital Library. As you move through it, notice how one poem changes the meaning of the next, and how the space between them begins to speak.

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. Haiku featured in the Book of the Week Archive are selected by the THF Digital Librarian, Vidya Premkumar and are used with permission.