i left long ago (writing in one breath Book 1)

i left long ago is ai li's very first book of cherita, a short form poem of 6 lines written in 3 stanzas of 1-2-3 which she created in 1997, and which tells a story and continues the age old tradition of storytelling.

It belongs to her writing in one breath series which are all available on Amazon.

This book explores the poet's search for true identity and self and why we should not be afraid to be our true selves. ai li's cherita will take you on a healing journey with words, minimal in content, but overflowing with personal truths and the deepest of emotions. She writes without armour.

Here is one example from this book :-


like rain

on the old sundial
a fallen sky

with dusk
colouring
it abandoned


This book of 90 virgin cherita poems belongs to a collection of life journals written as contemporary haiku and tanka, and cherita. These are writing in one breath poems. They take poetry into the realm of spirit and are touched by zen, loss, joy, the surreal, temps perdu, the erotic, humour, truth, the everyday, and the sublime. All the six senses are here.

The book has been edited to be experienced two ways. It can be read as a storybook and as an anthology of individual poems.

ai li 's poems have been widely published in the UK, USA, and Japan. One of her six word haiku has been included in 'Haiku in English - The First Hundred Years' which features work by Jack Kerouac, Ezra Pound, Allen Ginsberg, E E Cummings and many others, and is published in hardback by WW Norton & Co, New York 2013. She is the creator of Cherita and has also created seventeen original linked forms akin to renku aka renga. She lives quietly and mindfully in London and writes in a Rousseau inspired dream yard watched over by three old stone buddhas.

ai li is the editor and publisher of the cherita. a monthly journal which is available in paperback and on kindle on Amazon, and the founding editor and publisher of still, moving into breath and dew-on-line.