Sonora Spring Haiku

Sonora Spring Haiku by poet and neuroscientist Judith Lauter provides a photographic and poetic account of three spring months in the lush Sonoran Desert near Tucson, Arizona.

In a radical departure from the natural settings of most "classical" haiku—a world of misty wetness, cranes, pagodas, and perhaps a solitary aged man—these poems evoke a stony landscape of space, sun, and sharp edges. Such an extremely wide range of application for the form shows us that poetry is perhaps the most flexible of the literary arts, capable of engaging almost any experience or geography.