Care Ethics and Poetry is the first book to address the relationship between poetry and feminist care ethics. The authors argue that morality, and more specifically, moral progress, is a product of inquiry, imagination, and confronting new experiences. Engaging poetry, therefore, can contribute to the habits necessary for a robust moral life-specifically, caring. Each chapter offers poems that can provoke considerations of moral relations without explicitly moralizing. The book contributes to valorizing poetry and aesthetic experience as much as it does to reassessing how we think about care ethics.

Lenard D. Moore and African American Haiku: Merging Traditions identifies Moore as a primary figure in the American Haiku Movement as well as a significant contributor to the field of African American haiku. Ce Rosenow analyzes the ways in which Moore combines haiku with a variety of other traditions: African American storytelling, jazz poetry, ekphrasis, and elegies. An examination of Moore's haibun, a Japanese form combining prose and haiku, reveals the further development of the African American aesthetic created in his individual poems. Ultimately, the author argues that Moore's decades-long engagement with haiku and his prolific publication history solidify haiku as an established form in African American poetry.

Haiku, Other Arts, and Literary Disciplines investigates the genesis and development of haiku in Japan and determines the relationships of haiku with other arts, such as essay, painting, and music, as well as the backgrounds of haiku, such as literary movements, philosophies, and religions that underlie haiku composition. By analyzing the poets who played major roles in the development of haiku and its related geners, these essays illustrate how Japanese haiku poets, and American writers such as Emerson and Whitman, were inspired by nature, especially its beautiful scenes and seasonal changes. Western poets had a demonstrated affinity for Japanese haiku, which bled over into other art mediums, as these chapters discuss.

This collection of ten critical essays is the first scholarly criticism of haiku by Sonia Sanchez, who has exemplified herself for six decades as a major figure in the Black Arts Movement, a central activist in civil rights and women's movements, and an internationally-known writer in American literature. Sanchez's haiku, as an integral and prominent part of contemporary African American poetry, have expressed not only her ideas of nature, beauty, and harmony but also her aesthetic experience of music, culture, and love. Aesthetically, this experience reflects a poetic mind which has helped the poet to shape or reimage her poetic spirit.

American Haiku: New Readings explores the history and development of haiku by American writers, examining individual writers. In the late nineteenth century, Japanese poetry influenced through translation the French Symbolist poets, from whom British and American Imagist poets, Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, T. E. Hulme, and John Gould Fletcher, received stimulus. Since the first English-language hokku (haiku) written by Yone Noguchi in 1903, one of the Imagist poet Ezra Pound's well-known haiku-like poem, "In A Station of the Metro," published in 1913, is most influential on other Imagist and later American haiku poets. Since the end of World War II many Americans and Canadians tried their hands at writing haiku. Among them, Richard Wright wrote over four thousand haiku in the final eighteen months of his life in exile in France. His Haiku: This Other World, ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert L. Tener (1998), is a posthumous collection of 817 haiku Wright himself had selected. Jack Kerouac, a well-known American novelist like Richard Wright, also wrote numerous haiku. Kerouac's Book of Haikus, ed. Regina Weinreich (Penguin, 2003), collects 667 haiku. In recent decades, many other American writers have written haiku: Lenard Moore, Sonia Sanchez, James A. Emanuel, Burnell Lippy, and Cid Corman. Sonia Sanchez has two collections of haiku: Like the Singing Coming off the Drums (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998) and Morning Haiku (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010). James A. Emanuel's Jazz from the Haiku King (Broadside Press, 1999) is also a unique collection of haiku. Lenard Moore, author of his haiku collections The Open Eye (1985), has been writing and publishing haiku for over 20 years and became the first African American to be elected as President of the Haiku Society of America. Burnell Lippy's haiku appears in the major American haiku journals, Where the River Goes: The Nature Tradition in English-Language Haiku (2013). Cid Corman is well-known not only as a haiku poet but a translator of Japanese ancient and modern haiku poets: Santoka, Walking into the Wind (Cadmus Editions, 1994).

This collection of ten critical essays is the first scholarly criticism of haiku by Sonia Sanchez, who has exemplified herself for six decades as a major figure in the Black Arts Movement, a central activist in civil rights and women's movements, and an internationally-known writer in American literature. Sanchez's haiku, as an integral and prominent part of contemporary African American poetry, have expressed not only her ideas of nature, beauty, and harmony but also her aesthetic experience of music, culture, and love. Aesthetically, this experience reflects a poetic mind which has helped the poet to shape or reimage her poetic spirit.