The perfect gift for the frustrated motorist in all of us: a collection of hilarious and supremely clever haikus about the vicissitudes of driving.
How many times this week has your morning commute, or just plain driving to the grocery store, turned into a road-rage-inducing nightmare? A soccer mom steals your parking spot. A cell-phone guy cuts you off on the freeway. A student driver nearly rear-ends you at the mall. Take heart. Honku: The Zen Antidote to Road Rage by Aaron Naparstek (Villard Books; June 2003) is all you need to lower your blood pressure and make you forget that jerk in the yellow SUV.
Aaron Naparstek used to throw eggs at the cars blasting their horns beneath the window of his Brooklyn apartment. But after a terrifying incident with an enraged egg-splattered motorist, he recognized that he needed a new way to channel his anger. So, he began writing haiku poetry about the honking and taping them to neighborhood lampposts. He called them Honku, and soon the local lampposts were wrapped in poetry composed by a variety of anonymous neighborhood honkuists. A new form of road rage self-help was born.
A collection of more than one hundred hilarious and incisive haiku poems, Honku belongs on every dashboard in American. Shining the high-beams on the dark side of America's car culture, Honku distills the daily horrors of commuting, parking, and ordering from the drive-thru into a time-honored and respected verse form. It's the perfect read for the 30 to 60 hours that it is estimated you will spend stuck in traffic next year.
Aaron Naparstek is a writer, interactive media producer, and transportation activist in Brooklyn, New York. He and his fiancée Joanne recently moved from their honk-ridden neighborhood to a nice old town house with a big oak tree in the backyard, where, instead of waking to car horns, they arise each morning to the sound of chirping birds.
Now about those damn birds...