"Rudy Bankston ponders how he survived.

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The answer is in this slim, thoughtfully illustrated volume of Haikus, Snippets of Soul.

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It’s in the words; the very creation, impact and lasting impression of the words. The perfect titles like Middle Finger, Bitter, Sigh, Furtive Pirouettes, Predators (…”cry us a river/we’ve been swimming with great whites/since the slave boats sailed”) and Saucy act as a springboard for what starts out timely and loud and strong and angry and revealing and it builds, it builds with a scaffolding of hope and love and angst and favor and sensuality, so that you have to take a breath…and you reach Conversations- parlay and banter between two poets, Rudy and Marca…”she said: maybe I’m simple/it’s a pejorative term/I prefer pared down” and you come to Musings with its bumper sticker candidates like the stellar Myopia, “it is difficult/to help someone that you don’t/want to understand”

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And lest you forget that this is a writer who paid for sins he did not commit, there is the ending, called Cypher, an exchange between a black man, Rudy, and a white woman, Tina, about privilege and empathy, about color and pain. That section could be the framework for a course in school, the course about assumptions and race, microaggressions and healing. For whether there is hope, whether we move forward, whether we are humane; we are human, we should, God help us, be i Am We, the gospel of Rudy; for he, after all this, is inclusive and shares his path as an educator, as a member of this Tribe. So you go back a few pages, and you reread Tenet: “i believe in you/with all of my war-torn heart/i hold you sacred.”

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You hit it out of the park Rudy, Snippets of Soul is universal magic."

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Micaela Sullivan-Fowler, University of Wisconsin, Madison

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