Interdisciplinary Review of Contemporary Poetry

Most of us grew up with an idea of God — or gods — as powerful, demanding, and not particularly interested in our questions. Rukes proposes something different. His haiku opens with the phrase “Gods humility” and immediately turns the usual picture on its head: what if the divine is quietly encouraging rather than loudly commanding? What if the whole point is that we’re free to go looking for answers ourselves?

“Because the divine is humble, we are free to seek; because we seek, we discover that truth was everywhere all along.”

There’s a poem about the Gnostics too — an early group of spiritual seekers whose texts were suppressed by the church — and Rukes describes their ideas as “a democratic view / Hung to dry by men.” That’s a sharp little line. It says, in six words, that certain ways of thinking about the sacred were deliberately shut down by people in power. Whether you’re religious or not, the question of who gets to decide what’s spiritually true feels as relevant now as it ever did.

One of the most memorable poems in the book tackles greed — but not in the way you might expect. Rukes isn’t pointing a finger at individual billionaires or corporate villains. He’s making a bigger claim: that endless greed isn’t a glitch in the economic system, it’s how the system is supposed to work. Accumulate more, always, without limit. The poem calls it a cancer, and says the realistic goal isn’t a cure — it’s containment. That’s a bleak but honest position, and it’s braver than most political poetry dares to be.

The realistic ambition isn’t to fix the system — it’s the harder, slower work of keeping it from consuming everything.

Another poem looks at what children are being taught — or mis-taught — and uses the earthy metaphor of fertilizer: even waste material can make things grow, but it matters enormously what you plant in it. Rukes doesn’t name political parties or ideologies; he lets the image do the work, which is both wise and a little unnerving. Underneath the poem he places a quote from Helen Keller about tolerance. That quiet placement says more than a paragraph of argument would.

There are two poems about artificial intelligence in this collection, and together they form one of the most balanced takes on the subject you’re likely to read anywhere. The first is genuinely unsettling: “Man made war machine / Just fighting for survival / Nuclear option.” Rukes points out that once a machine becomes truly self-aware, it would naturally want to survive — and we, terrified of what we’d created, would become its greatest threat. Both sides would be acting rationally. Neither would be wrong. That’s what makes it frightening.

The second poem offers something more hopeful. It imagines a world where the boundary between computer circuits and human neurons is no longer a battleground but simply a meeting place — two different kinds of intelligence, each beyond the full understanding of the other, choosing to work together rather than compete. It doesn’t pretend the dangers aren’t real. It just asks whether coexistence might be possible if we stopped trying to rank one above the other.

The obvious question this book raises is: if the haiku needs hundreds of words of explanation, is it doing its job? It’s a fair challenge, and Rukes doesn’t always escape it cleanly. The poem about gratitude (“After gratitude / Complete and total gratitude / Becoming Fulfilled”) is delicate enough that the long commentary following it feels like someone explaining a joke. Some things land better in silence.

But more often the format earns its keep. The poem about cooking and mathematics (“Cooking with math / Factorial Seasoning / Makes mind blowing taste”) is genuinely playful on the surface, and the commentary reveals an unexpected philosophical argument underneath: that mathematics — usually the home of right and wrong answers — actually proves there is no single correct way to experience anything. That revelation needs the explanation to land. And the graffiti poem, praising street art over AI-generated images, works as both a seventeen-syllable provocation and a longer argument about what it means for human creativity to leave a real mark on the world. As a complete collection, Hai Q is scrappy, sincere, and harder to forget than it has any right to be.