American Haiku

"With a sober, unflinching eye, poet Scot Young unfurls sketch after sketch of the quiet awe of the country life, the animal and plant kingdom at odds with barbed wire and rusty trucks emphasizing the tending of a wild land. The absurd, and the occasional nod to the occasional hero ("brautigan is taller/than a rainbow breaking the/surface of quiet") the poet turns the haiku form on its head as he hybridizes the form with the sonnet, with free flowing variations along the way, and in doing so, Scot continues to show us how the message informs the form, but also how the form informs the message."

-Paul Corman-Roberts, Beast Crawl Literary Festival, Operations

"Inspired by the likes of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Todd Moore, and others who have taken stabs at the American Haiku, Young takes the ever-evolving form and makes it his own. While the poems here vary in length and style, they all carry the music and the spirit of the more traditional form. Full of stark imagery both personal and universal, the poems flow from one to the next seamlessly carrying the reader along."

-William Taylor, Jr., A Room Above a Convenience Store (Roadside Press)."

"If you're a fan of tradition, Scot Young's American Haiku may just take you by surprise, but what else is tradition there for than to give those seeking different paths in this world something to break away from. Young does just that, coming closer to modern poets like Ted Berrigan or Cid Corman than those writers of more formal haiku, but with a more Midwestern spin on things, words hung together by rural poverty, by the peace found in a quiet breeze, by all of the things we turn away from and those we rarely take the time to notice."

-John Dorsey, Pocatello Wildflower

"In this fine collection of unconventional haiku, Scot Young successfully breaks all the rules and offers us sequenced and sonnet haiku, one-word lines and other breaks from the traditional three-line haiku. He covers a wide array of topics from observations about nature to poverty, love, road kill, fish, animals, and education. The poems include nods to his poetic heroes including jazz stars, Bob Marley, Basho, Bob Dylan, Richard Brautigan, and Charles Bukowski. These poems are both thoughtful and visceral, and any reader will find plenty to enjoy and want to carry around to reread for when the need arises."

-Maryfrances Wagner, Missouri's 6th Poet Laureate, The Immigrants New Camera (Spartan Press)

"As poets, we spend much of our lives exploring the relationship of ourselves to the world. This can be a complicated endeavor, but Scot Young's American Haiku is familiar and delicate, elegant even. He has reimagined the haiku in a way that makes sense for him, pulling at the rebel ghosts of the forefathers of the western haiku. Scot is able to capture those moments in life that are often passed over as unimportant or insignificant. His ability to see the depth of a moment and carve out the best part is one of the best things about this collection."

-Aleathia Drehmer, author of Layers of Half-Sung Hymns (Cajun Mutt Press)