Judging from her exceptional poems in Like Zeros, Like Pearls (Charlotte Lit Press 2025), award-winning poet Lola Haskins has both a scientific and a literary bent to her world view. In this new and glorious collection, she showcases both. Like the cicadas in her poem “The Spirituality of Cicadas,” creatures believed by ancient Chinese to consume “only dew,” these poems are a wonder.
Haskins has long shown us how nature is a guiding light, and in Like Zeros, Like Pearls, she continues to do so. With verses sometimes quite scientific and literal and at other times more allusive, she boldly focuses on insects in this collection. Readers should expect to be awakened into a kind of reverence for these vital but sometimes ignored (even shunned) life forms. She also establishes in these vivid, lovely verses the insects’ essential place in the world’s ecosphere, and how inconsistently (at our own risk) we as humans treat them despite their importance. Haskins expresses their value in myriad ways and with her artist’s keen vision, she captures the magic of insects in verses that can astonish with their creativity and lushness.
Lola Haskins
Haskins, a renowned poet, has a generous body of previous works that establish her talent for combining the personal and the spiritual with a deep understanding of the natural world. In Like Zeros, Like Pearls, she once more does just that. Haskins states that “every story” in the collection is “certifiably true.” As reflected in her introduction, the science in the poems has been verified by university professors and by her own, extensive research.
The book has been long in its creation, fueled by Haskins’ own intense curiosity about the world she lives in. As stated at the publisher’s site: “Fifteen years ago, Lola Haskins stepped out of her house and was so struck by the fact that she knew almost nothing about the multitudes living in the air around her and in the earth under her feet that she spent the next many years interviewing entomologists and reading every secondary source she could get her hands on. Like Zeros, Like Pearls is the glorious result of that exploration.”
The title of this collection comes from the poem “Poem Ending with an Image from The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting (1782).” In this verse about the mating of the Pterophyllia camellifolia (more commonly known as the true katydid), Haskins writes:
“By dawn the male will
have flown, and his mate with
her camellia wings, but double rows
of eggs will glisten along the twigs
they’ve left, like zeros, like pearls.”
Long a master at varied poetic techniques, Haskins continues to delight readers with phrases like this from “Specks” about fire ants: “Kick a mound / and specks / startle in all directions / like handfuls / of tiny lights.” Also, in “Shells,” she writes: “The cicada emerges / from her slit skin / as delicately / as someone stepping from / a bath.” Some of her similes can be rather startling, such as in her poem “Inside my right ear,” where she writes “a mosquito whines, not / like something flying / but like an old woman / tied to a chair / who keens / without knowing she does.” Haskins’ powers of association shine throughout as when she sees a bug bite in “After the Picnic” as a “pale ring /… like the glowing / aureole a full moon / casts on a clearing / as an alien ship / floats slowly down.”
Even the titles in this collection hold their own as lines of meaning and power. For example, “The Consequence of Man’s Disrespect for the Natural World, Expressed as the Sting of a Certain Wasp” is followed by a poem not much longer, in which “like a breached ship / on a darkening sea, / you slip out / of sight.” In “Imago: Portrait of a Young Poet” the Chiloloba acuta (more commonly known as the green chafer beetle) is more fully revealed:
“It’s not her elytra,
glittery and hard,
but the second, delicate pair
of wings they conceal,
folded along artful veins,
that when it’s time
will open and carry her.”
All in all, these are stunning poems, rich with the power to awaken readers’ senses to the beauty and intricacy of nature—specifically, insects. Even if you don’t come to the book with a natural fascination for the subject, don’t worry—you’ll find yourself drawn in. By the end, you may well be flipping to the bibliography, eager to discover more.
Lola Haskins
Lola Haskins’ poems have been broadcast over the BBC and her work has appeared in such prestigious publications as The Atlantic, London Review of Books, The New York Quarterly, Georgia Review, Rattle, Prairie Schooner, and others. Her body of work also includes fourteen previous collections of poetry, a beginner’s guide to the poetry life, and a non-fiction book about Florida cemeteries. Twice nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, she has been honored with three book prizes, two NEA fellowships, four Florida Cultural Affairs fellowships, the Emily Dickinson/Writer Magazine award from Poetry Society of America, and many others. Her book “Homelight” was a Southern Literary Review Poetry Book of the Year in 2023.
The following poem appears in its entirety with the permission of Lola Haskins.
Water Striders
Gerridae
seek a pond or river that has been silent a long time
and speed across its surface on dry bodies,
front legs poised for a struggling dragonfly or surfacing larva
which they suck empty, middle legs
powering ahead, back legs guiding. When their times come,
they signal each other by sending out ripples.
For this, they are sometimes called Jesus bugs. Also
because if their water falls too far,
they burrow into mud and wait, and in winter cold
crawl inside plant stems and wait
so when they resurrect we think they came from nowhere.
Some striders, though, live all their lives
in open sea. And what will these do when the sea
crusts and the sky rains fire?
We put this to them as a koan, but like all masters
they will not say.
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