Vanished Roads is a collection of 104 contemporary haiku by Thomas L. Vaultonburg, illustrated by artist Tré, that explores memory, loss, place, aging, solitude, and the possibility of renewal. Rooted in the landscapes and changing seasons of the American Midwest, the book approaches haiku through what Vaultonburg calls Prairie Zen: an informal, distinctly Midwestern way of paying attention to the ordinary world and discovering that the ordinary is rarely ordinary when we actually stop to look at it.
These poems travel through back roads, rivers, fields, birds, snow, abandoned places, moonlight, childhood memories, and the small encounters that accumulate into a life. Rather than treating nature as scenery separate from human experience, Vanished Roads finds the two continually crossing. Grief appears in weather. Memory inhabits roads and houses. Birds become momentary companions. Seasons remind us that disappearance and renewal are not opposites but parts of the same process.
The book moves through an emotional arc from grief and disorientation toward acceptance, attentiveness, and renewed engagement with the world. Its central idea is not that we can recover what has disappeared. Some roads really do vanish. People die. Places change. Childhood ends. Bodies age. The past cannot be reconstructed simply because we miss it. Instead, the poems ask what becomes visible when we stop trying to find our way back and begin paying attention to where we actually are.
Artist Tré’s eight original illustrations are an essential part of that journey. They are not merely decorative additions to the poems. His images create another visual language running alongside the haiku, giving the book the feeling of a small collaborative art object as much as a conventional poetry collection. The spare relationship between poem, illustration, and open space allows the reader to slow down rather than race through the book.
That spaciousness is deliberate. Vanished Roads is designed around the traditional brevity of haiku, generally presenting a single poem on a page and allowing each moment room to exist on its own. The poems are accessible without requiring previous knowledge of haiku, Zen, or contemporary poetry. They can be read individually in seconds, but the cumulative experience of the collection reveals a larger meditation on impermanence, resilience, and attention.
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