Now available on Amazon $5.38 + shipping
Coming on Kindle $.99 (soon) as well
I should say a few words about this one. The first Boxcars on Walnut came out on paper, in 2012, when I moved to Texas. I simply took every haiku I'd written about southern Illinois and put it in a single paper volume, 73 haiku in all. My distribution system was: if someone wanted one, I gave it to them. Any kind of "you write me I send one" is a kind of illusion. I've been trying to get things on Amazon so that people can see everything I've done that's worthwhile. So it occurred to me, this should be online too, and in fact there is a little more about southern Illinois I still had yet to say, so I just wrote about forty more, put them together, and put them on Amazon.
There are other reasons to print it. In fact there is a possibility of making small books about places I've lived (Tex-ku, for example, or New-Mexi-ku) and have each one develop a kind of character, and possibly tell a specific story. The story of my eighteen years in southern Illinois is not that special; my marriage split up almost as soon as I got there, and I would have remained, stranded and suspended, and working interminably hard, had I not met a sociology professor who whisked me off to warmer climes. But I could easily use this book to tell a few other stories. You set it in southern Illinois, you have Cedar Lake, the strip, all the places that are so familiar, and yet you lead the reader through a set of relationships that may or may not be connected. The idea holds fascination to me.
I did not, however, pull that off in this one. This is the second edition: it has many images from southern Illinois (117, to be exact), is a very thorough and colorful view of a beautiful place, and tells no particular united story, from start to finish. It is what it is - a collection of southern Illinois haiku. Some of the original 73 have been altered. It has its own website. It is my tribute to southern Illinois.
