By Rob Carney. Wakefield Press, 2025.

There is a centuries-old Japanese form of writing called the haibun: meditative narratives ending with a haiku that acts as a summary or extension of the ideas and moods in the prose. In Accidental Gardens: New & Revised, Rob Carney both honors this form and gives it an update for the 21st century. These 48 essays—including 16 collected for the first time in this new edition—are all short and end, haibun-style, with poems or encapsulating images. These essays are impressed by the natural world and unimpressed by politics. They’re lessons on poetic craft and poetic themselves. They’re at home in the American West but aware of the whole earth, all its landscapes and animals and magic, but also its fragility, since so many of its human inhabitants are reckless and absurd. Sometimes hilarious, sometimes reverent, Accidental Gardens: New & Revised is always smart, and vital, and concerned.

Rob Carney grew up in the Pacific Northwest but moved to Utah in 1997. In addition to Accidental Gardens: New & Revised, he is the author of nine books of poems, including The Book of Drought, which won the X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize. He has received the Milton Kessler Memorial Prize, the Robinson Jeffers/Tor House Foundation Award for Poetry, and he’s written a series called “Old Roads, New Stories” for Terrain.org (terrain.org/tag/rob-carney/) for the past ten years. Favorite drink: coffee. Favorite animal: the Great White. He is a Professor of English at Utah Valley University and lives in Salt Lake City.