Pop Goes the Haiku is M. L. VanBlaricum's collection of "American Pops," three-line poems related to haiku and senryu but intentionally free from strict syllable counting. In the preface, VanBlaricum frames the book through Jack Kerouac's idea of American haiku: simple, direct, image-driven poems that capture a moment without poetic overworking. The collection is organized around emotional and observational clusters: love and feelings, moons, observations and happenings, questions, birds, nature and seasons, and travel.

The strongest through-line is a mature attention to fleeting experience. VanBlaricum writes about marriage, parents, grandparents, surgery, old friends, frogs, birds, weather, childhood embarrassments, aging bodies, memory lapses, travel landmarks, and small jokes hidden in ordinary life. Many pieces lean toward senryu because they focus on human foibles, irony, and humor rather than formal seasonal nature imagery. The poems are often plainspoken, but the best ones leave interpretive space: an empty playground, a wife still sleeping beside an absent partner, crosses marching on Normandy Beach. Murf O'Dean's drawings and VanBlaricum's photographs give the book a scrapbook-like visual rhythm, supporting its central idea: remembered moments, sharply seen, can become concise poetry for readers. It is accessible, domestic, comic, elegiac, and deliberately modest in scale.

This is VanBlaricum's second book of poetry. His first, Reflections in a Boomer's Eye, was published in 2016.