The Neighbor’s Red Car
and Students Breathing

First published in Woodnotes #30, Autumn 1996, page 48.

The Neighbor’s Red Car and Students Breathing by John Sheirer. 1996, 24 and 20 pages, 5½ by 8½ inches. Each $5.00 postpaid from the author at Asnuntuck Community-Technical College, 170 Elm Street, Enfield, Connecticut 06082 [address no longer correct]. The first of these two understated books, The Neighbor’s Red Car, offers 64 haiku and senryu arranged seasonally in four sections focusing on the theme of neighborhood. The second book, Students Breathing, is a breezy narrative in haibun form about John Sheirer’s experience as a writing teacher. Anyone who’s ever taught a class will enjoy this! The essay-haibun is sprinkled liberally with 49 haiku and senryu. Two poems from each book, tastes from feasts you should order in their entirety:

evening walk

from every home

blue television glow

dusk the icicle stops dripping

night class the first yawn starts an epidemic

reading essays

for dinner

three pretzels