The latest collection from the editor of Modern Haiku Press. Gurga is a three-time winner of first place in the Haiku Society of America Merit Book Awards.
First Place
Haiku Society of America
Merit Books Awards for 2026
Judges comments:
First Place goes to a challenging, rewarding book that reflects a master poet’s transition from “normative” to “experimental” haiku. Gurga breaks his poetic journey into four parts, each headed by an informing epigraph about Japanese aesthetics or cognitive poetics. What results is a highly original organization of haiku. Initial explorations of unusual seasonal juxtapositions slowly give way to the defamiliarization of experience and the prolongation of perception. Throughout, Gurga excels at joining abstractions to the concrete and sensual. He takes risks with form, content and expression. His themes range widely over love, marriage, aging, gun control, violence, gender, language, myth, the sacred. Sensitive, intelligent, incisive, tender—The Whisper I Wished For is a tour de force.
from MH 57.1 Book Review:
"The collection is poetically rich . . . It offers a rare glimpse of the thought processes underpinning the artistic growth of a poet of note. Even more importantly, the whisper I wished for is a compendium of possibilities—what English-language haiku and the poets who write in this genre can, with breadth of reading and depth of thought, become."
~Jennifer Hambrick
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Modern Haiku Press
PO Box 2016
Champaign, IL 61825
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