Taken together, the haiku and haibun of Trinidad, Sedgwick, Ashbery, Merrill, and Bashō himself, demonstrate the elasticity and enduring relevance of a form that at its best—as Sedgwick describes Merrill’s best moments of queering the haibun form— creates
sentences fraying
into implosions
of starlike density or
radiance, then outinto a prose that’s never quite not the poetry.