Frequently Asked Questions | Absorb This Silence: High Desert Haiku
Discover the story, inspiration, poetry, and art behind Absorb This Silence: High Desert Haiku by Marta Knobloch. Set against the vast landscapes of the American Southwest, this illustrated collection invites readers to experience the high desert through moments of stillness, observation, beauty, mystery, and reflection.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Absorb This Silence: High Desert Haiku about?
Absorb This Silence: High Desert Haiku is an illustrated collection of haiku by poet Marta Knobloch inspired by the landscape, light, wildlife, seasons, silence, and spirit of the American Southwest. The collection explores both the exterior landscape of the high desert and the interior experience it awakens, capturing individual moments in nature through spare, intentional poetry.
Who wrote Absorb This Silence: High Desert Haiku?
The book was written by Marta Knobloch, a poet and author of four award-winning poetry collections. Her work has appeared in literary magazines and anthologies in the United States and internationally, including publications in Australia, Ireland, Italy, England, and India.
Where is Marta Knobloch from?
Marta has traveled extensively, lived abroad, and spent a decade in the high-desert mountains of the Big Bend region of Texas. She now makes her home in Taos, New Mexico, where the high desert continues to influence her poetry.
Why did Marta Knobloch choose haiku for this collection?
Marta describes haiku as the poetic form that best expresses her intense response to the high desert’s exterior and interior landscapes. Through haiku, she seeks to reveal a living instant in nature, capturing a singular moment in time and space.
Does the book use traditional haiku form?
Yes. The collection is described as using the traditional three-line, seventeen-syllable 5-7-5 sequence, allowing Marta to distill expansive landscapes and powerful natural imagery into remarkably concentrated moments.
Why is the American Southwest so important to the book?
The Southwest is much more than a setting. The landscape becomes an active presence throughout the collection. Taos, New Mexico, the high desert, mountains, mesas, adobe, wildlife, changing light, weather, and seasons all help shape the book’s meditation on nature, time, resilience, reverence, impermanence, and simply being.
Is the book connected specifically to Taos, New Mexico?
Very much so. The book identifies Taos, New Mexico, as part of its creative home, and its foreword describes the collection as a kind of keepsake of Taos, connecting the landscape’s past, present, and future.
How is Absorb This Silence organized?
The collection unfolds through three evocatively titled sections: I: Day, II: Year, and III: Here. Together, they move the reader through daily rhythms, seasonal change, and a deeper sense of place and presence.
Who created the artwork in Absorb This Silence?
The illustrations were created by C.J. Lucien. The book credits Lucien with the visual interpretation of Marta’s haiku, bringing another artistic dimension to the high-desert experience.
What inspired C.J. Lucien’s illustrations?
Lucien drew partly from the Japanese aesthetic concept of Shibui, associated with simple, subtle, unobtrusive beauty. Her ink drawings use an economy of line and form to respond to the contrasts of the Southwest, where tranquility and ruggedness, spontaneity and restraint exist together.
Are the illustrations simply pictures of what the poems describe?
No. They function more as visual interpretations than literal translations. The artwork loosely moves between Marta’s words, leaving room for reflection and encouraging readers to bring their own emotional response to both the poetry and the imagery.
What themes appear throughout Absorb This Silence?
The collection returns repeatedly to silence, solitude, landscape, light, wildlife, time, change, continuity, mortality, resilience, reverence, and humanity’s relationship with the natural world. The foreword describes the work as a meditation on both impermanence and continuity and on the way the land can hold our past while pointing toward what we are becoming.
What does the title Absorb This Silence mean?
The title speaks to one of the central experiences of the collection: silence as something present rather than empty. Throughout the book, stillness creates room for observation, awareness, awe, and connection. The title itself also emerges from one of Marta’s haiku, reinforcing silence and solitude as recurring motifs within the collection.
Is Absorb This Silence only for people who already read haiku?
Not at all. The brevity of the poems makes the collection approachable, while the imagery and accompanying artwork create several ways into the work. Readers can experience it as poetry, visual art, a meditation on nature, a portrait of the Southwest, or simply an invitation to slow down and notice more.
Is this a book meant to be read from beginning to end?
It can be, but it does not have to be. Absorb This Silence lends itself beautifully to slow reading. A reader might spend time with several poems, return repeatedly to a favorite page, or simply open the book and allow one poem and illustration to become the experience of that moment. The foreword itself invites readers to take their time and allow the words and images to wash over them.
Have any of Marta Knobloch’s haiku been published previously?
Yes. Individual poems represented in the collection have appeared in earlier exhibit catalogs, literary publications, poetry calendars, and haiku anthologies, including Loch Raven Review, Texas Poetry Calendar, Heart Breaths: Book of Contemporary Haiku, Pegasus: The Haiku Anthology, and others.
Does the book honor the people and heritage of the American Southwest?
Yes. Marta dedicates the collection to the Peoples of the American Southwest, acknowledging the heritage that has enriched the region and the lives connected to it.
Who wrote the foreword to Absorb This Silence?
The foreword was written by Jana Short, Editor-in-Chief of Best Holistic Life Publishing. It introduces the collection through the idea of honoring the silence between words and explores Taos as a landscape of history, spirit, memory, and awe.
What kind of reader would enjoy Absorb This Silence?
The book may particularly resonate with readers drawn to haiku, poetry, nature writing, Southwestern art, Taos and New Mexico, mindfulness, contemplative living, landscape, visual art, meditation, and beautiful gift books. It also offers something for anyone who feels restored by quiet observation and the natural world.
Where can I learn more about Marta Knobloch?
Readers can learn more about Marta, her poetry, and her other work through her official author website. The book itself identifies MartaKnobloch.com as the place to discover more about her writing.
And I would add one more question at the very bottom that is purely for conversion:
Where can I buy Absorb This Silence: High Desert Haiku?
Then we make the answer specific to wherever you want people purchasing it, with buttons for Amazon, Barnes & Noble, the publisher, independent bookstores, or Marta’s site, depending on where it is currently available.
For the website, I would also make the SEO title:
Absorb This Silence FAQ | Marta Knobloch High Desert Haiku
And the meta description:
Explore frequently asked questions about Absorb This Silence: High Desert Haiku by Marta Knobloch, an illustrated poetry collection inspired by Taos, New Mexico, nature, silence, and the landscapes of the American Southwest.
This FAQ can become a very strong Google page because we’re naturally connecting the exact entities we want associated with the book: Marta Knobloch + Absorb This Silence + High Desert Haiku + haiku poetry + Taos New Mexico + American Southwest + nature poetry + illustrated poetry collection.