A Slender Reed: Haiku Vignettes by Jay Bryan

Jay Bryan was the Poet Laureate for Carrboro, North Carolina from 2010 to 2012. His poems have been published in Blink, they wrote us a poem VII and VIII (Health Arts Network at Duke), the Ecozoic Reader, Cowboy Poetry, Old Man Press, Main Street Rag, and the Gilbert- Chappell anthology, Witness: Appalachia to Hatteras. In 1994, he published Haiku for Carroll, a book of haiku written to his deceased wife during her terminal illness. He compiled and edited the Carrboro 100th Birthday Poetry Anthology, published in May 2011. In 2013, Finishing Line Press published Selected Poems. In 2025, Main Street Rag published Behold, a collection of poems and prose about Jay’s work with migrant workers in North Carolina and Florida in the 1970s. Finishing Line Press is scheduled to publish A Slender Reed: Haiku Vignettes in February 2027.

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PRAISE:

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A moving range of voices fill this slim volume from Jay Bryan. In his haiku, he writes of and with loved ones, giving space to their own voices, creating a powerfully creative and compassionate conversation. In a series of painterly, dreamlike haibun, he explores the Wyoming backcountry. And throughout the book, he gives the reader deep and loving observation and lived experience, reminding us, in the words of Kahlil Gibran, it is “in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.”

–Matt Snyder, poet, Haiku Society of America member and anthology editor 2026, and recipient of a Poetry Pea 2025 Golden Peas

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With the world as his palate, Jay Bryan takes us from Chapel Hill to Kenya to Wyoming to Nantucket to Saxapahaw and home again. His view of his world is intimate and tender, full of love for nature and humanity. These haiku and haibun cannot be read without feeling a strong emotional response as we realize whom he is addressing and what it tells us about Jay himself. Prepare to be involved.

–Jean Earnhardt, poet

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A Slender Reed gathers haiku sequences, each one a small constellation of moments, feelings, and gestures that draw us into a story more suggested than told. Some sequences are elusive, going back and forth in time and place. Sets of haiku that appear in one story reappear together in another later in the book, carrying new meaning. The love and compassion in many of the poems show how Bryan and his companions go through the world.

–Dave Russo, President, The Haiku Foundation

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A Slender Reed by Jay Bryan is a collection of intimate poems filled with love of family and nature and strengthened by faith.  Taken as a whole, these poems offer courage, hope, and an openness to the world.   Readers will be left with many poems to savor and to reflect upon, and will want to return to them time after time.

–Lucretia Kinney, long-time friend