Wholesale Blind to the Prairie, by Tate Lewis-Carroll

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features. Blind to the Prairie is a collection of haiku and some of its related forms. Haiku is one of the most distilled forms of nature writing. It investigates and juxtaposes the immediate world of the writer so as to first make available, then obvious, the suchness of things for the reader. The brevity of haiku invites emptiness—think bowl or bird bone—into the reader’s mind, which seems to be yet another dwindling resource in this age of direct deposits and automatic withdrawals. Our bowls are too easily filled. Our bones have become too dense for flight. But as I take on this empty practice of haiku, I notice myself being filled with nothing, smack dab in the middle of the Prairie State.