Jennifer Hambrick is an award-winning poet, public radio broadcaster, multimedia producer and classical musician who lives in Ohio, USA.

Jennifer’s haibun collection, Joyride, was published by Red Moon Press in 2021. Joyride was Shortlisted for The Haiku Foundation’s 2021 Touchstone Distinguished Books Award and won First Place in Haiku Canada’s 2022 Marianne Bluger Book Award.

Haibun is known as a poetic form that combines prose with haiku. Other than that, the form is very flexible. The prose may be quite short, or much longer, and may be linked with a single haiku or with several haiku.

Clearly, to produce a good haibun, a poet needs to be skilled in writing both haiku and prose. But, more than that, a poet needs to pay close attention to the relationship between the prose and the haiku. The haiku should not simply restate or summarise the prose; the haiku should add to the scope and depth of the haibun as a whole, thereby expanding the reading experience.

The “prose” in Joyride demonstrates a range of writing styles including narrative, conversation, unpunctuated text and even a ghazal. Well, OK, a ghazal isn’t prose. It’s a poem comprising couplets that adhere to a particular rhyming pattern. Other writers have experimented with the haibun form: combining haiku with highly poetic prose, or even with a short poem. To my knowledge, though, Jennifer’s combination of a ghazal with haiku is unique.

The following haibun from Joyride shows how even a relatively short haibun can capture the reader’s attention:

Right Out

So I’m seven years old, and a bunch of my relatives take me to the family cemetery.
“I’m gonna be put right here,” my great aunt says, standing on my grandfather’s grave, and pointing to the next plot over.
Freaked me right out. I mean no way am I ever stepping on dead people.

family reunion
the colors of sunset
on a fresh peach

Jennifer is enthusiastic about the storytelling possibilities for haibun and the potential to bring haibun into interdisciplinary symbiosis with other art forms. In her role as program chair for the recent Haiku North America conference (held from June 28 to July 2, 2023) Jennifer scheduled a panel discussion on innovation in haibun and a further session on the world’s first-ever Haibun Film Festival.

As Jennifer said, “I wanted to take haibun to the next level as an art form in interdisciplinary conversation with the visual, temporal, and performative art form of film”. The Film Festival, therefore, invited writers to submit unpublished English-language haibun, a selection of which were passed to a group of video producers who turned the haibun into short films. I encourage you to view the resulting films at the Moving Poems website. These films are a very rich art form, layering vision and sound upon the prose and haiku from the original haibun.

Jennifer’s own haibun offer a joyride through space and time. Back to our childhood when we were taken on journeys to meet family members or to visit country towns. Back to our youth when every day was filled with sunshine and the excitement of setting out on our own road trips.

Joyride is filled with fresh discoveries, and fresh language used in innovative ways. The innovation and stylistic variation evident in the “non-haiku” parts of Jennifer’s haibun throw a spotlight on the untapped potential of this literary form.

That Summer

everything was wheelie-o, bling-bloop, water in the frying pan, skittereedoo. everything purple and pink, crackly-crunch, salty-sweet, lemon-lime. everything high-heeled, lip glossed, hair moussed, thonged, pixie cut. everything school’s out, girlish pout, without a doubt, push and shout. everything untied, wide-eyed, jute-chinned, hemmed-in, take-n-bake, glass bead, knock-kneed. everything tilt-a-whirl, carousel, gyro tower, brown cow, show them how, nope, no going back now.

walking around
in a new place
first kiss

You can purchase a copy of Joyride by Jennifer Hambrick from Jennifer’s own website or from Red Moon Press.