We don’t have a poetry expert on staff here at THS, so when we received a copy of Peter Hankoff’s Haiku, Inc., a reflection of corporate culture in 17 syllables, it fell to me our resident corporate drone to review. The work is geared towards the casual reader who can identify with the often frustrating aspects of office bureaucracy. It will be from this perspective that I critique.
The book is a collection of 117 haiku, or poetry consisting of 3 lines and 17 syllables a style of Japanese origin. Unlike its Japanese counterparts, Hankoff’s haiku do not center around nature, but instead office life in sarcastic, ironic, or depressing tones. Poems are punctuated by a small set of illustrations, appropriately sketched by the author on post-it notes in meetings. The work is available from amazon as a kindle download.
Many times while reading I was reminded of demotivational posters, both take corporate buzz words and apply a layer of dark humor. For this I thoroughly enjoyed the work. Some of Hankoff’s darkest haiku are his best. However, it is hard to recommend in its current form. It does not work well as a book much less a kindle book, as it lends itself to reading cover to cover. Given that haiku are rather short this makes for a very quick read. This would work much better in a form that forced the reader to space out the haiku such as a daily twitter post, or desk calendar.
