Reading Takuboku Ishikawa

Solonche is productive and prolific, but that doesn’t water down his poetry. He can compress a philosophical treatise into three lines. His epigrammatic tidy poems are philosophic gems. Solonche sees humor and encapsulates it; he frames a thought in perfect verse. He’s playful and profound—the more he writes, the more he seems to know. Beneath the Solonche simplicity are significant social comments, and his goodwill reinforces the best in us.

—Grace Cavalieri, Washington Independent Review of Books

Solonche, an accomplished poet, employs various forms in this compilation, including haiku, prose poem, and free verse. The poems often imaginatively enter into the natural or material world via anthropomorphic similes…Many works have an aphoristic quality that recall Zen koans, and they can be playfully amusing or even silly…A strong set of sympathetic but never sentimental observations.

—Kirkus Reviews

The tone is established from the outset: wry, wise, sardonic and playful, drawing the reader irresistibly in. Solonche is revealed as a philosopher in the mold of Wittgenstein: aphoristic, charismatic, acerbic and oddly mystical. If you met this book in a bar, you would definitely want to take it home with you and every day thereafter congratulate yourself on how lucky you’ve been. But that is true of all his books.

—David Mark Williams