table for one
my paperback also
full of creases

Raw from the breakup of my 20-year marriage, I assume “New Beginnings” bookclub is for lonely readers, like me. I am wrong. Separated and divorced members exchange contact info before and after the book discussion and gulp wine nonstop. My sobs over the cheeseboard when asked about my separation don’t deter men from asking me out. Feeling like an alien on a planet of marriage hopefuls, I remain steadfast in my “No, thank you” mode. Gradually, I cry less and talk more.

cosmetics counter
my character flaws covered
in concealer

After one year of gatherings, I agree to meet a man from the bookclub for coffee. Not because he’s good looking. But because we grew up in the same part of New York City. At a local cafe we talk about our favorite novels. His: Middlemarch. Mine: Persuasion. Twenty-five years on, we’re still reading novels. Sentence by sentence, chapter by chapter. To each other in bed.

Roberta Beary’s

most recent full-length collection, Crazy Bitches: selected haibun, was released by MacQ on 8 March 2025. Beary (they/she) is the longtime haibun editor for Modern Haiku and co-author of Haibun: A Writer’s Guide (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2023), as well as the author of four award-winning poetry collections.

Her debut collection of short poems, The Unworn Necklace, won the Snapshot Press Book Award in 2005; was first published in Great Britain by Snapshot Press in 2007 (with a hardcover edition in 2011); and was a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Book Award, the first book of haiku to receive such recognition. Their collection of prose poems, Deflection (Accents Publishing, 2015), was named a National Poetry Month Best Pick by Washington Independent Review of Books. Their collection of haiku, Carousel (2024), won the Snapshot Press Book Award in 2019.

Individual writing awards include Bridport Prize for Poetry, Touchstone Award for Haibun, and Kusamakura Grand Prize for Haiku. Their work has appeared in The New York Times, Rattle, Atticus Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, and other publications. Beary identifies as gender-fluid and calls Washington, DC (USA) and County Mayo, Ireland home.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Haibun: A Writer’s Guide, by Roberta Beary, Lew Watts, and Rich Youmans, reviewed by Ce Rosenow in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 24, 20 August 2024)

⚡ Guests Kat Lehmann and Roberta Beary on “Experimental Haibun”: Episode 72 of The Poetry Space podcast by Katie Dozier and Timothy Green (2 August 2024)

⚡ New Book: Haibun: A Writer’s Guide by Roberta Beary, Lew Watts and Rich Youmans, an interview in Flash Frontier (July 2023)

⚡ Dealing With Rejection, an essay by Beary in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 12, March 2022)

⚡ Featured Guest: Roberta Beary on Rattlecast 133 hosted by Tim Green, editor of Rattle poetry journal (YouTube, 28 February 2022)

⚡ Tiny Love Stories in The New York Times (8 January 2019); scroll five stories down the page for Roberta Beary’s “Now It’s All Fresh Fish” and her photograph of lobster traps in Clew Bay, Ireland.

⚡ The art of brevity, an interview by Ciara Moynihan in Mayo News (22 January 2019)