Available from www.Lulu.com/modernenglishtanka and from major booksellers;
or order from the publisher by mail: Modern English Tanka Press Order Form.
Price: $24.95 USD.
ISBN: 978-0-6151-6318-5
Trade paperback. 196 pages, 6.00" x 9.00", perfect binding, 60# cream interior paper, black and white interior ink, 100# exterior paper,
full-color exterior ink.
Price: $37.95 USD.
ISBN: 978-0-6151-6319-2
Hardcover with dust jacket. 196 pages, 6.00" x 9.00", jacket-hardcover binding, 50# cream interior paper, black and white interior ink, 100# exterior paper,
full-color exterior ink.
OUCH: Senryu That Bite - Alexis Rotella has been writing haiku, senryu and tanka since her late 20’s. She is one of the most accomplished American writers and is able to write seemingly effortlessly in all three genres. She discovered haiku while working on an undergraduate thesis on zen at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. Rotella is probably most well known for her senryu or psychological (serious) haiku. Her book LOOKING FOR A PRINCE (1991) took the haiku world by storm. Cor van den Heuvel calls Rotella “the witty, tender, funny, sad, sometimes MERCILESS younger sister of haiku . . . the . . . often-times absurd creature somersaulting through the universe somewhere between the angels and Donald Duck!” When asked where she gets her talent for senryu, she remarks, “From my father. He was a born psychologist who didn’t mince words. He saw right through people. No one could pretend around him.”
Alexis Rotella, also known as the Queen of Senryu, will not disappoint you in OUCH.
This superstar poet, so well known for her humor and pathos, will take you on a journey you’ll never forget. You’ll be shocked, you’ll cackle, and you’ll wonder how anyone who weighs only 115 pounds can pack such a punch.
from the back cover . . .
“I know I am not the only one who finds Alexis Rotella’s unerringly pithy senryu to be one of the remarkable phenomena of contemporary short form poetry. OUCH is part comedy, melodrama, family epic, burlesque, entertainment and, here and there, straight autobiography. The relationship between Rotella and the speakers in her poems is something like that which dramatists have with their characters. And what a citadel she has built here, of human foible and weakness, of sheep and wine, elaborated upon by the poet’s own genius for anecdote and descriptive detail. But for the compassion and empathy that underlie every page and every utterance found here, we might be more alarmed than delighted to see our neighbors and friends through such a provocateur’s gleeful, all-seeing pair of eyes.”
— Michael McClintock, Contributing Editor, Modern English Tanka
“Beware! Alexis Rotella’s OUCH is a striking collection of senryu that will seize you with its teeth.”
— Alan Pizzarelli, senryu editor of Simply Haiku
“Using puns, irony, wit, and a touch of venom these brutally funny, and sometimes sad and moving, poems about the human condition by Alexis Rotella might have come from a pen combining the talents of a Don Rickles, Dorothy Parker, and the Bard of Avon himself, except that they are more stinging and more hilarious and that they are all Rotella. Wince, squirm, and cry, but she’ll still have you laughing your head off as it falls from the chopping block. Ouch! Indeed.”
— Cor van den Heuvel, Editor of The Haiku Anthology: Haiku and Senryu in English.
