In this gorgeous third collection, Sandra Lim investigates desire, sexuality, and dream with sinewy intelligence and a startling freshness. Truthful, sensuous, and intellectually relentless, the poems in The Curious Thing are compelling meditations on love, art making, solitude, female fate, and both the mundane and serious principles of life. Sandra Lim’s poetry displays stinging wit and a tough-minded approach to her own experiences: She speaks with Jean Rhys about beauty, encounters the dark loneliness that can exist inside a relationship, and discovers a coiled anger on a hot summer day. An extended poem sequence slyly revolves the meanings of finding oneself astray in midlife. A steely strength courses through the volume’s myriad discoveries—Lim’s lucidity and tenderness form a striking complement to her remarkable metaphors and the emotional clamor of her material. Animated by a sense of reckoning and a piercing inwardness, these anti-sentimental poems nevertheless celebrate the passionate and empathetic subjective life.
Here, available for the first time in an English translation, is The Wilderness by Moritake Takeichi, who is known, along with Iboshi Hokuto and Batchelor Yaeko, as one of the "Three Great Ainu Poets". This seminal work should be considered must reading for anyone interested in Ainu culture and history, and Japanese literature in general. These poems provide an especially poignant insight into the intense pressures experienced by the Ainu people after Hokkaido was annexed by Japan in 1879, when assimilation became synonymous with survival. Moritake, whose Ainu name was Itakunoto was born in the fishing village of Shiraoi in southwestern Hokkaido in 1902, the eldest son of Ehechikari (father) and Otehe (mother). His father passed away when he was still an infant and he grew up in extreme poverty. He started working in the local fishery at the age of 9 to help support his family. His formal education ended in 1915 at the age of 12 when he graduated from elementary school, after which he left Shiraoi to work as a migrant laborer in the herring fisheries at Ishikari, Atsuta, Usuya (Obiracho) and Rumoi. At the age of 20, after a period of intense self-study, he took and passed the exam to become a full-time employee of the National Railway, an astonishing feat for someone with only a primary school education. He gave up this position 1935 to devote himself to the service of his Ainu brethren. Moritake's life spanned a period of rapid and intense change. A few decades before his birth Japan was still run by samurai warriors. Within the period of his lifetime Japan transformed itself from an isolated collection of feudal states into a modern industrial nation. Great progress was achieved, but for the Ainu in particular this progress came at great cost. As one reads this collection of poems one is struck by the uninhibited and eclectic nature of his work. The first section of the book consists of verse poems in a variety of metrical styles. Some, influenced by classical Chinese patterns, are reminiscent of western romantic poetry in their use of figures such as nymphs and naiads to convey a wistful view of traditional Ainu life in ancient times, while others paint a brutally realistic picture of the desperate challenges that faced the new generation of Ainu in his day. Moritake, in the preface to this volume, described his work as follows: "Nowadays the Ainu people have the opportunity to receive a proper education, and their religious beliefs are gradually becoming modernized. Their sensibilities are being refined through exposure to newspapers, magazines and all the other instruments of modern civilization, and the old religious ceremonies and legends that have been passed on by word of mouth since time immemorial are being forgotten. Once the elders living today have passed from this world, many of the elements of our ancient heritage will be lost forever. As one who was born during this period of transition, on the one hand I am excited when I think of the opportunities for progress that assimilation into Japanese society will bring, but on the other I find myself overwhelmed by an indescribable sense of loss. It was nostalgia for this ancient heritage that inspired me to begin visiting the elders from time to time. I listened to them tell the old stories, and asked them about the ways of life, manners and customs of the Ainu in the old days. I made sure to participate in all of the old ceremonies so that I could experience them for myself, and in this collection of poems I have tried not only to describe these more traditional aspects of Ainu life, but I have also attempted to paint a frank and unvarnished picture of the feelings and experiences of the younger generation of Ainu, surrounded, as they are, by the excitement and distractions of modern society." (1937) A facsimile bilingual version is available from Rose Books.
Poetry. "LOVELIEST GROTESQUE is a darkly fascinating book. It's a sweet, shape-shifting creature and a fun postmodern romp. Page after page fills with energetic surprises, keeping the reader intrigued--formal quatrains juxtaposed against prose vignettes... short-line riffs against skinny sonnets against a ballad that spreads across the page against a pantoum with the word "orient" in it. Finally, the slippery slope of too much fun might stop for a nano moment to contemplate an important existential question: "Why were there manatees at all?" Obviously, the answer is this: after 9/11, in the new millennium, all formal discourses must explode, splinter and fragment and coalesce again into a stunning, new voice."--Marilyn Chin
Winner of the 2022 Publishing Triangle Trans and Gender-Variant Literature Award A thrilling, discursive second collection from “a poet for this hour—bewildered, hopeful, and cracklingly alive” (Mark Doty). The poems in Ari Banias’s thrilling and discursive second collection, A Symmetry, unsettle the myth of a benevolently ordered reality. Through uncanny repetitions and elliptical inquiry, Banias contends with the inscriptions of nationhood, language, and ancestral memory in the architectures of daily experience. Refusing the nostalgias of classicism and the trap of authenticity, these poems turn instead to a Greece of garbage strikes and throwaway tourist pleasures, where bad gender means bad grammar, and a California coast where mansions offer themselves to be crushed under your thumb. A piece of citrus hurled into one poem’s apartment window rolls downhill and escapes the narrative altogether in another. Farmers destroy their own olive trees, strangers mesmerize us as they fold sheets into perfect corners, “artists who design border wall prototypes are artists / who say they “leave politics out of it.’” Climate collapse and debt accelerate, and desire transforms itself in the ruins. From within psychic interiors and iconic sites—the museum, the strip mall, the discotheque, the sea—A Symmetry attends to the intimate, social proportions of our material world and discerns the simmering potential of a present that “can be some other way. And is.”
The poems in Lucky Wreck trace the excitement of plans and the necessary swerving detours we must take when those plans fail. Looking to shipwrecks on the television, road trips ending in traffic accidents, and homes that become sites of infestation, Ada Limón finds threads of hope amid an array of small tragedies and significant setbacks. Open, honest, and grounded, the poems in this collection seek answers to familiar questions and teach us ways to cope with the pain of many losses with earnestness and humor. Through the wrecks, these poems continue to offer assurance. This darkness is not the scary one, it's the one before the sun comes up, the one you can still breathe in. Celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of Limón's award-winning debut, this edition includes a new introduction by the poet that reflects on the book and on how her writing practice has developed over time.
Animal lovers will laugh out loud at the quirkiness of their feline friends with these insightful and curious poems from the singular minds of funny cats. In this hilarious, bestselling book of tongue-in-cheek poetry. The author of the internationally syndicated comic strip Sally Forth helps cats unlock their creative potential and explain their odd behavior to ignorant humans. With titles like "Who Is That on Your Lap?," "This Is My Chair," "Kneel Before Me," "Nudge," and "Some of My Best Friends Are Dogs," the poems collected in I Could Pee on This perfectly capture the inner workings of the cat psyche. With photos of the cat "authors" throughout, this whimsical animal book reveals kitties at their wackiest, and most exasperating (but always lovable). Ideal for that "crazy cat lady" or "cat mom/dad" in your life this collection of poems makes for the perfect cat-themed gift for anyone who's obsessed with our feline friends.
Poetry. Latinx Studies. Through two long poems, Jesùs Castillo's TWO MURALS explores the personal and political sides of love, selfhood, and transformation in a wasteful age. "Variations on Adonis," the first sequence, is filled with music and memorable images, evoking the decline of civilization alongside a desire to live. The second sequence, "A Mural After Darwish," is a love letter to a woman, to nature, and to memory. Castillo's visions span the landscapes of different countries and ages, always questioning and curious. Abundance and destruction are placed side by side in his consideration of language, life, and death. TWO MURALS offers the reader urgent views of love and perseverance despite the traps of the past and the uncertainty of our future. "Jesùs Castillo locates the subtle rhymes between bomb and tomb, plastic and arctic, in these two sweeping sequences that resonate with personal, political, geological and geographical histories. 'I will call this city a sad marionette,' writes Castillo, 'And call the continent's shorelines roving wolves.' This book is a gathering inside one heart of many voices and the silences that divide them, a virtuoso performance, spellbinding, funny and profoundly sad. I am reminded of Brecht's haunting question and response: 'In the dark times / Will there be singing? / Yes, there will be singing / About the dark times.'"--D.A. Powell
