The haiku path, like the road to hell, is paved with good intentions. For instance, the title haiku of my collection The Unworn Necklace (Snapshot Press, 2007) is subject to myriad interpretations by readers:

all day long 
I feel its weight 
the unworn necklace  

When I read this haiku, people in the audience often tell me they find it moving. If I ask in what way, I hear a variety of answers. Some tell me about pieces of jewelry they have lost. Others about jewelry boxes that overflow with trinkets. Still others ask why I am wearing a necklace, since it is obvious from my haiku that I don’t like necklaces. Sometimes, but not very often, I hear about a particular piece of jewelry that holds deep meaning for its wearer. I don’t correct any of these interpretations because I believe that readers or listeners of a haiku bring their own interpretation to what they are reading or hearing.

When I wrote the title haiku, I was in a new relationship with the man who would become my second husband. There were ups and downs, surprise gifts, and arguments. My prior life had imploded, and I was learning to find my way. I wanted to put into my haiku both the hope of a new relationship and the despair that it might go wrong, again. I had many versions of this haiku in my head. But like Goldilocks and her first attempts, none were just right:

after the argument 
putting away the necklace 
he gave me 

too angry to wear 
the necklace 
he bought me 

morning after 
still no agreement 
on what he said  

I finally realized that the way to write this haiku was to focus not on the argument but on the effect of the argument. For me, the most important part of the title haiku is the sense of loss which stayed with me the entire day, in the countless times I reached for the necklace that wasn’t there. It was a bittersweet experience, to know that love had come my way again and that it can hurt just as much at forty as it did at twenty.

 

—From Deep Breath: A Book of Haiku Evolutions by 20 contributing poets, edited by Terry Ann Carter and published by Leaf Press (2017); appears here with Beary’s kind permission.

Roberta Beary’s

most recent full-length collection, Crazy Bitches: selected haibun (MacQ Books, 2025), is a recent winner of the Haiku Society of America’s Merit Book Awards, was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Awards, and received a Touchstone Distinguished Books Honorable Mention for 2025. Her poems, CNF, and microfictions have appeared in The New York Times, Rattle, the Red Moon Anthologies, 100 word story, Atticus Review, Best Small Fictions, Contemporary Haibun Online, MacQueen’s Quinterly, and other publications. Her micro “I Still Dream of You, Ben” is long-listed for the Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Fictions 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. Their 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.

Beary’s most recent collection of haiku, Carousel (Snapshot Press, 2024), was honored with a Touchstone finalist award and with an HSA Merit Book finalist award in the haiku category. Individual writing awards include Bridport Prize for Poetry (2022); Touchstone Awards for Individual Haibun (2022, inaugural year) and 2025); and Kusamakura Grand Prize for Haiku. Beary identifies as gender-fluid and calls Washington, DC (USA) home.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Crazy Bitches, selected haibun, review by Marianne Paul in Issue 31 of MacQ (January 2026); republished from the print journal Haiku Canada Review (Vol. 19, No. 2, October 2025)

⚡ Review of Crazy Bitches by Cherie Hunter Day in contemporary haibun online 21.2 (August 2025)

⚡ Haibun: A Writer’s Guide, by Roberta Beary, Lew Watts, and Rich Youmans, reviewed by Ce Rosenow in MacQ-24 (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 Issue 12 of MacQueen’s Quinterly (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.