Blind to the Prairie, by Tate Lewis-Carroll

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Blind to the Prairie is a collection of haiku and some of its related forms. Haiku is one of the most distilled forms of nature writing. It investigates and juxtaposes the immediate world of the writer so as to first make available, then obvious, the suchness of things for the reader. The brevity of haiku invites emptiness—think bowl or bird bone—into the reader’s mind, which seems to be yet another dwindling resource in this age of direct deposits and automatic withdrawals. Our bowls are too easily filled. Our bones have become too dense for flight. But as I take on this empty practice of haiku, I notice myself being filled with nothing, smack dab in the middle of the Prairie State.

Time is the crucial element in this compressed form of poetry. At the crux of this compression is the kigo, the seasonal word or phrase that provides a setting, mindset, or some other familiarity where the reader and the speaker can coexist and from where the poem can then develop. It’s through these kigo that we are able to track the shift from one season to the next in a collection of haiku. Haiku collections were, and still are, both magical and ritual accounts of the Japanese year, while also acting as a record of the evanescence of all being. This is why traditional collections of haiku, as well as many modern interpretations of the form, are organized seasonally: spring, summer, fall, winter.

The haiku in this collection work closely together as snapshots, as remaining pieces of a puzzle ravaged by agricultural and urban development, to preserve what beauty remains intact among the vanishing prairies. To read these poems is to be invited into the tucked away corners of the land, almost free of human concern: the ditch of a country road, a mulberry thicket, a timberline defining the border between fields. More than that, these poems can, and very often do, stand free of human intervention. The subjects of these haiku will continue to rise and fall, sway, and sing, whether or not there is anyone there to witness it. We’ve only haply arrived in time to notice.

"To write a haiku, one has to leave the prison of the self to encounter the sentience of all living things. As I read Blind to the Prairie, I marvel at how Tate Lewis-Carroll’s haiku thrum with attention to the mood of each season, the metamorphoses of plants and animals, and the absence of will and desire in the face of these transformations. These poems have taught me how to see the prairie in an entirely new way. I love this work. "

—Joanne Diaz, author of My Favorite Tyrants

"While it’s near impossible to explain the magic of stirring haiku, we know the symptoms of reading them—unspecified dizziness, followed by seeing the world anew. Such awaits the reader of Blind to the Prairie. Tate Lewis-Carroll, in poem after poem, discovers wonder in the everyday, with delicacy and humor: “beyond fields, more fields,” and “storming— / sunny / on TV.” But don’t listen to me. Open the book. Wander “beyond fields.”"

—John Bradley, author of Dear Morpheus, The Glue That Is You

"Haiku lives! In Tate Lewis-Carroll’s hand, this ancient form not only lives, but flourishes, in the Zen landscape of former prairie. The playfulness (recall Basho) often relies on modern puns and irony, but Lewis-Carroll keeps the traditional use of nature to signify emotion. Their “breath-length” poems can take your breath, sometimes by the startling juxtapositions, sometimes by the wry observation, sometimes the surprise of language, sometimes just by a sigh of pleasure. Lewis-Carroll is not blind to the prairie, despite their clever blue eye spot moth. They see through and beyond the prairie. The metaphor for this collection lies in a haibun that centers and grounds the collection—a prairie fringed orchid, beautifully described, just slightly taller than the surrounding weeds. A farmer, engaged in cutting a huge cottonwood, sees it as a weed."

—Kathryn Kerr, author of Turtles All the Way Down

Tate Lewis-Carroll (they/them) is the author of What’s Left (Finishing Line, 2023), Guests of Sunlight (Ghost City, 2024), Blind to the Prairie (Bottlecap, 2025) and is the editor of the 2022 Texas Poetry Calendar anthology (Kallisto Gaia). Their work has won the 2023 Best Haiku Award (Haiku Crush), was nominated for the Haiku Foundation’s Touchstone Awards for Individual Poems Prizes in 2023, and has been selected as a finalist for the 2022, 2023, and 2024 James Tate International Chapbook Prize (SurVision). In August, 2023, they were selected to participate in Tupelo Press’s 30/30 poetry project where they, and a small cohort of poets, wrote a poem a day that was then published on Tupelo’s website. They’ve been awarded the Sutherland Fellowship from Illinois State University as they pursue a MA in poetry and publishing. Their work has been anthologized in The Best Haiku: International Anthology (Haiku Crush, 2023), Contemporary Surrealist and Magical Realist Poets (Lamar University Press, 2022), and appears in Modern Haiku; Hotel Amerika; Ghost City Review; Action, Spectacle; BlazVox; and others. Tate and their photographer wife, Izzy, live on a small farm in rural Illinois where they own and operate LC Homestead. Find them on Instagram @TateLewisCarroll.