Alexis Rotella — Touchstone Distinguished Books Award 2024

Alexis Rotella is the recipient of a Touchstone Distinguished Books Award for 2024 for the volume, Milkweed (Taylorville, Ill: Brooks Books, 2024).

Commentary from the Panel:

This beautifully-produced, hardcover collection presents the highlights of a many-decades-long writing practice by one of the pioneers of English-language haiku, Alexis Rotella. In the Author’s Preface, we learn that in the 1970s Rotella became fascinated by what she described as “tiny capsules of energy — word photographs that looked so easy to write.” That perceived ease turned out to be deceptive, as many of us also discovered in our early attempts at writing haiku. Rotella’s first acceptance from a haiku journal came from Randy Brooks, who published the following senryu in High/Coo Quarterly:

Husband home
from work
haiku for dinner again

It is fitting that all these years later, Brooks has published this retrospective of Rotella’s selected work. It is also interesting to note that Rotella’s first published senryu is representative of her consistent interest in human relationships. Milkweed is dedicated to her late husband, Robert Rotella, and poems in which he figures appear throughout the collection, making it, among other things, a touching tribute to a long marriage.

In bringing us the selected work of particularly accomplished haiku poets in recent years, Brooks Books provides a valuable resource for readers. Gathering the best haiku from a long list of prior publications, these greatest-hit retrospectives give readers a sense for a poet’s range of work in a single volume. In Rotella’s case, the list of her previous books spans three pages. Milkweed gathers the best poems from Rotella’s prolific career and incorporates recent edits by the author.

Rotella is best known for her evocative senryu, such as the following classic:

Late August
I bring him the garden
in my skirt

Other equally moving senryu in the collection include:

Undressed—
today’s role dangles
from a metal hanger

Just friends
he watches my gauze dress
blowing on the line

Opening his
dresser drawer—
darkness slips out

In addition to her delightful senryu, this collection contains many nature-themed gems as well, each with Rotella’s characteristic style.

Hummingbird
tuning
the lily

Telling its side
of the story
gurgle of the creek

Cranking up
the sky
geese

But the poems that captivate us most strongly are those in which Rotella highlights small moments with particular emotional resonance:

Under the covers
he opens the jar—
fireflies

Dawn
the robin sings
your eulogy

The clean presentation of the poems without publication history makes for an aesthetically pleasing read. While the collection encompasses Rotella’s forty-five years of haiku, it is important to remember that this book is a “selected,” not a definitive “collected” volume. She is very much alive and still writing. We are grateful to have more of Rotella’s poems to look forward to.

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