Help Keep Out: Volume 5

by Robert Letters

“Another collection of mysterious and haunting poems … will thrill readers who love the stark imagery and battles of epic poetry but want an update for the current national climate.” -Booklife “Dreamlike, with nightmarish scenarios fading into sweet moments in nature or love and then back to darker moments. Historical scenarios are juxtaposed against modern issues.” -Blue Ink Starred Review “The poems work when read as individual pieces, but the real poetry is in their combination. One can find patterns and connections between works that were composed months or years apart...A bracingly exciting read, and one that many – even those who haven’t followed Letters’ daily posts on social media – are certain to derive a great deal of pleasure from.” -Neon Books On February 16, 2015 Robert Letters posted a 5-line poem on the social media platform, Twitter. This began an ongoing daily practice that continued for over four years, resulting in a 1,700-poem sequence that ended on October 22, 2019. Help Keep Volume 5 contains Books 13-17, the final five books in the project.. The poems in Help Keep Out are predominantly informed by Asian forms – haiku, senryu, tanka, and sijo. While most of the structural characteristics of these forms have been preserved, this is not always the case, and traditional constraints inherent in the genres have often been ignored.

193 pages, Paperback

Published June 30, 2020

About the author

Robert Letters is an American author, educator, poet, artist, and songwriter.

His most recent book, Between Will and Abandonment: Independent Spiritual Practice is a must read for anyone who considers themselves religiously unaffiliated and spiritually independent. He draws on spiritual texts and masters from different faiths, laying out methods of daily spiritual practices that have been transformative in his own life with the hope that they will be for the reader as well.

Letters is also the author of nine volumes of Poetry: Dry Grass, Choking the Moon; talking with you in the dark; Recipe for Garum; and Help Keep Out: Volumes 1 – 5 (Paucus Publishing Company).

Dry Grass, released in June 2024, is a collection of English language tanka. It uses the 31 syllable Japanese form to explore a range of emotional experiences. Passion, memory, mystery, and many other discoveries await you as you dive into these poems.

Choking the Moon is a collection of American haiku and senryu. The collection is true to the traditional Japanese form, yet pushes English language haiku and senryu into new and unexplored territory.

In talking with you in the dark, a haunting collection of lyrics that first appeared on social media, Letters presents four sequences of conversation. But these conversations are curiously one-sided, and the reader must decide who is speaking, and who, if anyone, is listening. Each short poem is an independent work, but also an integrated component in a set of mysterious patterns.

Recipe for Garum, awarded an Honorable Mention in the 2020 Brockman-Campbell Book Awards, contains poems that embody the pungent quality of garum in three sections: a lyrical series that examines domestic life; a long narrative poem, "Canal;" and a sequence of short poems, mostly haiku and tanka, that chronicles a year of household life.

The five volumes of Help Keep Out document the daily posting of a short poem on the social media platform, Twitter. This daily practice continued for more than five years, and Help Keep Out: Volumes 1 - 5 contain the full series of the project. The poems are predominantly informed by Asian forms – haiku, senryu, tanka and sijo.

Letters’ CD Make Me Believe (Hondo Mesa Records) was released in 2015.