Theory of Orange by Rachel Simon
May 1, 2008
Pavement Saw Press, 2007
Review by Metta Sáma
“Free association is or “Everything that irritates us about others, leads us to understanding ourselves.”: a review of Rachel Simon’s Theory of Orange”
–Metta Sáma
Rachel Simon’s debut collection, Theory of Orange, 2005-2006 Transcontinental Poetry Award winner, judged by Dean Young, opens with the (false) promise of a “Recipe for Success”. Simon leaps from “eighth-grade embarrassment” to “a new apartment” and back again to “desired birth order[s]” and “compar[ing] childhoods”. This “recipe” seems to comment on poetry-making, book-making, as well as poet-making: “burn it in your cheeks for when doors/swing toward you faster than your arms can brace./Befriend lost children in the produce.” (3) The ironic title and attitude creates a light, self-conscious tone for the book.
A voice and brain-driven poet, Simon honors the frustrated leaps that permeate her world. In poems such as “When You’re Not Allowed To Daydream”, “Anxiety”, “Autobiography” and “Humid”, the jumps invite. In the prose poem “Daydream” she writes: “One can live for years without knowing the teaspoon is inaccurate. Call the bureau of weights and measurements. They’ll understand. In massage school I learned to rub a full belly in clockwise motion…” (1. Not only is the prose form a wonderful tool for these leaps, Simon’s humor has a mental, emotional, and psychological organization, creating a delightful and capricious symphony. In other poems free association works well for Simon’s tone, but don’t compel me to return to the lines and engage on a level beyond quirky, and often, predictable brain play.
Simon’s line, voice, and emotional range are most memorable in the poems “Rope” and “Present Tense”. These elegies to a friend who died young are heartbreaking because Simon gives way to the heart, the spirit and the body, as well as the mind. The lines are lumpy and the stanzas achingly untended, the language splinters, and I believe in all of the creaks. From “Rope”: “I can’t picture you opening the door of the hardware store/comparison shopping rope gauge, fingering/the textures, picking the blend that felt best rolled in your fist.” And ends: “Two years later,//two years in which I’ve pressed my face/into a pillowcase every night/I’m told you used a bedsheet, spun and knotted”. This poem honors the Simon seen earlier, the poet daring to take risks by moving from one idea/situation/image to the next, seamlessly and unpolished. Unlike the poems in which brain play is a short crutch, the shifts here feel entangled and real and powerful and muted in grief.
Many poems fail due to their floppy line and inert line breaks. There is no sense of identity in the lines as units, nor in the line breaks as tension and revelatory moons. While I enjoy free association, Simon’s thoughts on the page feel forged and lackluster. I’m more interested in seeing where these thoughts connect, instead of seeing that a poet can imagine queerly. The book, as a whole, feels staged, fretful, self-conscious, and anticipated. The poems often end abruptly or go on longer than necessary. Yet, Simon is a poet worth waiting for, precisely because she is self-conscious, fretful, stagey, predictable, and like any great young poet, willing to fall hard.
Metta Sáma is a book reviewer and poet. She previously reviewed Celia Homesley’s first book for Hercircle.
The Light Sang As it Left Your Eyes: Our Autobiography by Eileen Tabios
April 1, 2008
Marsh Hawk Press, 2007
Poems For
by GA. A. Banks-Martin
Eileen Tabios published her first book of poetry in 1996 and won the Philippines’ National Book Award for Poetry, fourteen collections followed. Her latest book seeks to creatively solve some of the most difficult of poetic problems: love, despair, hope without reason, and absolution. Therefore, it is with great excitement we read Eileen R. Tabios’ collection of poetry, The Light Sang As it Left Your Eyes: Our Autobiography.
Almost immediately we are offered along prose poem; a father portrait, although it is not the one we expect. Most fathers spend the day working or looking for work, in everyday places: police stations, firehouses, cabstands, restaurants, employment agencies. They honestly collect $12,000-$35.000 a year; motivated by little more than the approval of their wives and children. Unless, he is Ferdinand Marcos, who stole as much as a 100 billion dollars, who was accused of 1500 extrajudicial killings, and played a part in the execution of a popular political rival. Who believes such a father can be loved? Tabios, who asks: How many centuries until it was known that Judas was Jesus Christ’s/greatest apostle, not his greatest betrayer?
Having learned that reconciliation is possible we move from prose to Hay (Na) ku, a simple form, created by the poet, requiring six words stanzas composed of three lines. A form that challenges the notion that a line must be longer than three words; instead a line should be less than three words when more would serve only to destroy the purity of what is said. Consider this selection from The Mushroom Chapter:
Back in London
each autumn
I
would receive a
bag of
dried
mushrooms. The last
one arrived
in
the autumn of
1939, shortly
after
the outbreak of war.
Ironically what causes the thirty year parting of Tabios and her biological father is too painful for/even a poem but many outstanding moments awaits the reader as the two are reunited then parted by death. Some oddly sad and funny such as when the poet purchases a card for her parents 5oth Wedding Anniversary: For You Mom And Dad/ in curlicue script/ Sentimental drivel. But the poet with five million/ poems/ couldn’t/ muster anything better, while others hearken a sense of peace and well being. Cantos are usually associated with Ezra Pound, and are so complex that readers purchase an index to add with comprehension but these much like the rest of the other poems, are very palatable:
Canto 4
We labor less
as we near our Goal.
As we near our Goal
so do we fly, not run.
So raise your dark feet
from upon “Morocco’s sands”
And perhaps you are looking today at a sky whose
blue sapphire radiance often makes her sing, and
you hear her singing now.
No need for a guidebook just a few moments of uninterrupted silence.
One Window & Eight Bars by Rati Saxena
April 1, 2008
KRITYA Publishing, 2007
A Passage to India
Review by Kimberly L. Becker
Hindi poet, translator and Sanskrit scholar Rati Saxena believes that, “To write a poem / you have to / walk on fire.” In her second book in English, One Window & Eight Bars, she seems to do just that. It is apparent why Saxena has won major awards, including the prestigious Indira Gandhi National Culture and Arts Fellowship. Saxena is on fire with her gift for language, readily igniting admiration in her reader.
To read Saxena’s poetry is to be transported not only to a physical country, but also to a spiritual one where, “The taste of last night’s dream / persists on the tongue.” In the journal Kritya that she edits, Saxena provides insight into the philosophical basis for her work: “…poetry is not just words. There is something which gives life to poetry, something more than words…Vedic philosophy equates the ‘kavi’ (Poet) to Brahma. Thus ‘kavi’ could be the creator of this universe.”
Saxena’s universe is informed by ancient tradition, yet attuned to contemporary, especially women’s, issues. In “I, in Udaipur” she contrasts a peaceful setting with a painful reality: “By that tree, that temple- / thick with gods, drums and bells / longing for an offering, a cow waits- / with fly-flickering tail.” Then: “At the shore of this Lake / in some middle class family, / a fourth daughter is born. / No applause- / No drumbeat- / Only the shadow of a silence.” Forster portrayed colonial India; Saxena probes her own post-colonial India and bravely questions tradition: “A woman, have I / nothing to offer / my ancestors?”
Saxena explores the role of women across a lifetime. A mother responds to her daughter’s maturation: “She says / ‘Mother, I am really grown up’ / She catches a piece of cloud / spread across her face / I am worried / cover her with a red chunneri.” A daughter cares for her mother with Alzheimer’s –“It is my turn. / I shall comb your hair now”– even as she struggles with role reversal: “Oh! Is this my mother / or a careless little girl?” In the final poignant image the daughter acknowledges losing her mother as she has known her: “Like a flying kite / she is slipping from our hands.”
Women are also lovers. Some poems are deeply sensual: “I…have given you warm kisses on your feet / and stroked your whole body with my eyelashes.” Always there is the recognition that the body, for all its pleasures, is moreover, “a long bridge / from soul to soul.” Caress of the sea, taste of mango, scent of spices, tinkle of anklet bells, flash of a parrot’s wing: sensuous details such as these render the book a feast for body and soul. Saxena won the Kendra Sahitya Akademi Award for translation. In this book she translates the mysteries of the heart for an international audience. One Window & Eight Bars opens a view on a world at once familiar and exotic. No passport required.
Prau by Jean Vengua
April 1, 2008
Meritage Press, 2007
Pinning Down the Escape Artist
Review by Lee Kottner
“Listen to catch with intimate hooks the drift / of King James or a coroner’s conversation / nurse learned syllables as seeded fluff to Velcro . . .” Jean Vengua tells us near the end of her new poetry collection, (italics)Prau,(/italics) winner of the Filamore Tabios, Sr. Memorial Poetry Prize. In a 2006 [interview] (http://willtoexchange.blogspot.com/2006/01/interview-with-jean-vengua.html), Vengua calls herself “an escape artist” when describing her poetics, and (italics)Prau,(/italics) named after an Indonesian sailboat, is all about being on the move. The book is divided into four sections: Momentum, Displacements/In Place, Ghost Vessels, and Rowing/Breathing. Despite all that movement, or in some cases, longing for movement, one thing anchors Vengua firmly, and that’s her language. Though her settings range from Mindinao to Monterey to Alaska, it’s the rich images of her poetics that give us a sense of the place her poems come from.
That place is the poet’s body, its memories and constituent parts, its own place in the geography of the world. In “Night Diary,” she tells us “In the night the body, the meat diary, remembers certain conversations.” Vengua has gone about recording them. She lets us know what we’re in for in the opening poem, “This Isn’t Kansas,” informing us “there is no more new. a lot of / nakedness around here lately, though. it shuffles, goes / everyday under the radar, shifts sightlines . . .” and when she’s done, nothing is quite the same because our own sightlines have shifted to include the landscapes of emotion and migration.
In her bio, Vengua says that most of these poems were written “online, afloat on the sea of pixels.” She has had several experimental poetics blogs in the past and her poems have that flavor of stream-of-consciousness that steals over us so easily when staring into the void of the internet, speaking through our fingers. There’s an intimacy to her poems that late-night online chat room conversations have, when it feels safe to say anything. As Vengua says in “Night Stammers,” “Syntax breaks up. Ice breaks. If you can just weather a night like this huddled with your own voice.” You sign off and realize it’s 4 a.m. and you’ve told a complete stranger everything about your affair with a co-worker.
Vengua’s poems are not only intimate but playful as well, in both form and content. “Glowrius “ is ten words long and takes up the whole page with outsized, all-capped, phonetically spelled, oddly broken, bracketed words in deepest black and pale gray that almost seem to glow like green pixels on a black screen. Often, she breaks words in half without hyphens, merely dropping them to the next line to discombobulate her readers, muddle the meaning, and make us rear back and reread. There’s something almost Dada-like in her visual poetry, but the content matters too. In “Debit” she uses the convention of strikeout to “erase” without erasing the first half the poem. Reading through the struck-out words, you realize they were two separate poems that, together, make a third.
That’s an apt description of this collection itself; there’s so much going on in it, both parts and whole. Time slips away, people slip away, homelands change, new places become home. The boat goes out with travelers on the tide and comes back richly loaded with experience and memory laid out in rich language.
Defying the Eye Chart by Marilyn Jurich
March 5, 2008
Mayapple Press, 2008
Reviewed by Rachel Dacus
Opening this book at random, I was struck by the prevalent combination of frankness and expressiveness in these poems. The first poem I read, “25 Lines for Ascending and Descending Keys,” compelled because of its overarching music metaphor of piano keys and also because of its jazzy language and eccentric rhythms. Using music to dramatize a backward look at one’s childhood is a fresh and clever idea that seems to characterize a central quality of Marilyn Jurich’s poetry.
The poet addresses her child self with both compassion and reproach in these lines:
The eight-year-old rises, sticks out her tongue.
I (the she who used to be) refuse this mockery,
defeat – begin to practice “holds.”
I taunt, “I’m better than what you could become”
She continues the reflective review in a rueful self-duet: “You’d be much better now if you’d listened/ all those years, not closed your ears on me.”
The musical versatility of many of these lines reminds me of the imagistic surprises of Wallace Stevens and the verbal adroitness of Elizabeth Bishop. Jurich defiantly eschews the flatness current in so much of today’s poetry, and opts instead for often surreal imagery and dense language. I found her voice at its most original in poems combining these two qualities, as well as often incorporating myth – such lyrical pieces as “Oedipus Visits the Ophthalmologist,” “Prayer Addict” and “Planetary Pantoum, Glyphs on Mars.” The latter poem’s setting is strangely beautiful and repellent at the same time: “Across Phobos, fearful rock-fish moon,/ grooves tilt, repeat in narrow bands.”
poet describes other worlds – whether they are Mars or he Irish Jewish Museum in Dublin – in pithy mouthfuls. Jurich’s poems sometimes reminded me of English poet Alice Oswald’s linguistic and landscape fantasies. She uses even punctuation as a type of music in the following passage, whose uneven rhythm suits the exotic subject of a Martian landscape:
Like petaled comets, whorls lift from the crater.
Spiraling canyons above, colossal pyramids;
aureole fluting plays on polar ice-caps,
Sudden … mist, clouds massed like granite, wind.
Defying the Eye Chart is long for a poetry book (113 pages) and the focus broad (with seven different sections), but the length is justified by its honest, musical look at life and history, both personal and collective. This is poetry that makes no bones about life’s hard realities – aging, blindness, disability – but who avoids lament and rather sounds the wiser notes of praise, appreciation and laughter. There is elegance and sincerity here. Marilyn Jurich writes her own review in two lines from the poem, “Reading the Eye Chart”: “Unraveling my soul by what I see/ you count how close I come to hold desire.”
The Last Ceremony by Susan Deer Cloud
March 5, 2008
FootHills Publishing, 2007
Review by Kimberly L. Becker
Native Daughter
A writer of Blackfoot, Mohawk, Seneca heritage (Métis), Susan Deer Cloud grew up in the Catskill Mountains, but, as indicated on the Winning Writers web site, “has sojourned in many places.” Along the way, Deer Cloud has accumulated many awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature. Her bio on the NEA website reads, “her cat is not impressed by any of this.” It is hard not to be impressed, however, by Deer Cloud’s third book of poetry, The Last Ceremony.
In Native tradition, ceremony is central and healing. Deer Cloud laments the loss of tribal lands and traditions: “In what places might I do ceremony / … let fall sweet smelling tobacco to the ground / after the words are covered over with my sadness?” She mourns the diminished ceremonial life of her people: “I am not going to pretend. The only ceremony / we had left to us was taking rides in a dented / Chevy on dirt roads no city slickers could find. / The only ceremony left to us was stopping / at a path we mountain Indians knew about, / stepping behind one another, hands brushing / the bent ferns.”
Deer Cloud does not stand on ceremony: her language can be every bit as earthy as the landscape she inhabits. In one poem, the key word from a familiar phrase is changed from cojones to cunt. Deer Cloud unapologetically claims the power of the feminine, especially in the prize-winning poem “Welcome to the Land of Ma’am” (Prairie Schooner’s Readers’ Choice Award, 2003). In contrast to the current cult of young and artificial women with “collagen-smiles, sucked-thin thighs,” Deer Cloud dreams of reclaiming a time, “when older women were revered as beautiful elders, medicine women, / wise women, beloved women, when the People cried for their visions / in the female heart of the ancient hills.”
In her author’s statement for the NEA, Deer Cloud says, “I am of Native heritage, and our approach to life is very much one that includes thanksgiving, gratitude.” Indeed, her poem “Why I Love Being an Indian” celebrates an impromptu cell phone call from her sister, who has seen a vision above their Indian grandfather’s house: “I love this about being Indian, having a sister call me like this / me stopping in my tracks under florescent lights in a grocery store, / grinning a giant of a smile as she tells me about a cloud warrior.”
Deer Cloud writes with the strength of a warrior, yet she also evinces a certain vulnerability. In one of the most moving passages, she asks: “What if you could love yourself enough / to learn your own language, dance / between earth and sky? / Or at least pretend to?” In The Last Ceremony Deer Cloud does more than pretend—she dances, beautifully and powerfully, with words.
Forms of Intercession by Jayne Pupek
March 5, 2008
Mayapple Press, 2008
Review by LouAnn Shepard Muhm
Paper Chariots of the Profane
In Jayne Pupek’s 2008 collection of poems, Forms of Intercession (Mayapple Press), “the eternal optimist must be on strike.” These poems go to dark places, where all the fruit is rotting, all the children dead or abused, and all the lovers unfaithful. In the poem “Stories,” Pupek says “There are stories I don’t want to live,/ don’t want to tell, don’t want to write down.” And yet write them down she does, with a fierce clarity that makes it difficult for the reader not to turn away. It is the very excellence of the writing that makes this collection hard to read; if the images were less clear, less sharply drawn, we could go on more easily, not faced with such crystalline photos of ruin. When Pupek describes a therapy session in which inkblots turn into bats, they are “bleeding…/ Blue grey veins…pipettes snapped in half” and end up “Overhead, blind angels [who] flutter shit, and cry.” The senses are engaged, the revulsion complete. Describing the aftermath of a mother’s beheading of her child, Pupek makes us see “the bagged head…[the] small mouth open/ a cavern of milkteeth and flies.”
Imagery of the ravaged body abounds in these poems. Breasts “consist mostly of fat,/but fail to keep [the speaker] warm or well-fed,” or serve as simile for a fallen cake “flat as a breast/deflated with age” and are then removed, with “the smell of scorched meat,/ a black hole in the bandage.” In “Gangrene,” a stubbed toe reminds the speaker of “the stench in his boots;/red streaks growing dark,/wide; sap gathering green /in the deep purple crevice/where his missing toe belonged.” An aborted fetus is “a mass of cells/ splitting, replicating, taking root/ like a parasitic jellyfish.” Mouths are equated with wounds, stomachs are filled with bile, skin serves to cover “watermarks [that] never wash clean.”
The title of the book begs the question: Where is the intercession? Where is the relief for a poet who “…notice[s] things you do not see: a teller’s smirk,/skipped stitches, and ceiling cracks reaching past roof-line”? The speaker in the title poem says “sometimes you must intercede on your own behalf.” Perhaps the poems themselves are the intercessions. Perhaps she, like the writer she imagines in “Contributor’s Notes”, believes in the salvation of “images ignit[ing] in slivered light/…if only [s]he can jot down this color, thin/ and uncorrupted.”
Forms of Intercession is a journey beyond the veil into the gritty, gothic world of suffering. Readers who can withstand its clear-eyed, unapologetic view of pain and its causes will be rewarded with sharp imagery and keen analysis of the dark hidden worlds inside us.
Green Bodies by Rosemary Winslow
March 5, 2008
The Word Works, 2007
Review by Julie R. Enszer
Truth-telling is integral to poetry. Putting the truth into language is both a calling and a struggle for poets. In the forty-five poems of Rosemary Winslow’s first collection, Green Bodies, the struggle of language is evident in both form and content. Green Bodies is divided into three sections and although the book is interwoven thematically each section presents and addresses different concerns.
The first fifteen poems are an elegy for the poet’s brother. Winslow writes with great power and sensitivity about this death. In one of the most ambitious poems of the collection, “Walking Quaker Whiteface Road I Meet My Brother,” she engages both the metaphysical questions of grief in lines such as,
Once in my grief
I saw something of my brother appear
The night after the funeral
As I walked the floors of the house.
A place of whiteness, and sensed conveyance—
as well as the philosophical questions of grief when she writes, “What is it to lose a life you never/had time to live?” Winslow’s lyric and narrative impulses sing in this first section even as she introduces the content that will pressure and transform the collection in the second section.
Narrative wends its way back into Green Bodies leading the book to its conclusion in the final section. The third part can be read narratively as recovery, but it is recovery not only of personhood or the self but also of language. It is in understanding this structure and comment on poetic discourse that Green Bodies opens to its fullness and power as a collection of poetry. The final poem in the book about the dance of two beavers ends with these three words, “startled, suddenly, bliss –,“ a conclusion which even might be the key to the collection.
Winslow is a poet with a keen ear for the music of her poems, but underneath her sonority she is pressing the form and structure of poetry and interrogating language, asking when it works for us and when it fails. This is when her work is most potent: the concatenation of lyric and narrative with sound and form.
Body of Crimson Leaves by Celia Homesley
March 5, 2008
The Backwaters Press, 2006
Review by Metta Sáma
“a star/which grows slowly/more luminous”: Reading Celia Homesley’s Body of Crimson Leaves
To look at the cover of Celia Homesley’s debut poetry collection, Body of Crimson Leaves, one can easily imagine a Gretel or Red Riding or Snow White, some innocent and utterly curious girl, unafraid of the unknown, adventurous, and willing to get lost, in order to discover the bodies of leaves, the brilliant flesh of earth, and the haunting ease of trees. Homesley’s poems are quiet and unearth a hand willing to remove layers of bodies, slowly, for the hands to discover dirt, to discover a desire to listen to the river that “lies still,/nerves rotted” (44). This is a book of longings that penetrate the senses until the self is frightened, until the self is unabashedly clear about what it means to “die/picking flowers for/the dead” (45).
Body is a journey, of sorts, a collection that, as the title of this piece suggests (from “Night Pond”), reveals its interiors slowly, as if the body of the book itself, and the body of the poems themselves, are stars that do not, at the end of their lifespan, dim, but pulse and radiate, provide light by which the work can be read. In “Lily in Rain”, Homesley writes of a relationship that has wilted and blossomed, through age:
Old love
White trumpet
You curve through the hole
In my fence as if
I will float
Down into this weeping
Press my lips against your throat (16)
Similar to other poems in this collection, “Lily in the Rain” ends inside of a moment, leaning towards a silence, an emptiness, as if the poem itself waits for the luminous moment. Here, the poet leaves us in the stillness of desire, that of the “I” and that of the “lily”: each seems to want what the other possibly cannot and will not give. The sparsity of language, of punctuation, & of the line are further signals of the quiet embedded in curiosity and longing, and the promise of illumination if one is willing to listen and hunger. (Note, for example, that one unusual line, with “as if”, lingering off to the side, alone, and wondering.) These are not easy poems, ones with a firm ending, a closing of the door or the resolution of a problem; these endings signal wistfulness and perpetual aching.
Homesely works at her best when she sets out to discover what she’s willing to anticipate, whether it’s the lily she could press her mouth into, as lover, or the she who waits to dream of taking “lovers./Like shadows” (62). In these poems, the writing is direct and curious, and the poet embodies the minor quakes of need. In the back matter, Ralph Angel notes that “Everything grows in … Homesley’s [poems]. Everything rises and returns.” And if the line is a measure of growth, if the line is a measure of rise and return, then Angel’s elucidations are apt. When Homesley writes of the body in “Journey of the Spiritual Body”, for example, the “child/who feels worthless/save what his fingers/form//steeples/or the visages/of birds” (39) creates, in the line and its break, a body and spirit that “rises and returns”. We have to wait, in Homesley’s poems, for the light to break, to give way to feeling and meaning.
Body of Crimson Leaves builds and shines in this emboldened debut collection. While there are several poems that fall flat (in terms of tone and query), it is the body of imagination, the “chaos/I like to think of as beauty/when no one’s here to tell me otherwise” (31) that sparks and guides.
Aquiline by Jane Joritz-Nakagawa, A Review
November 3, 2007
review by Suzanne Kamata
In reading the poetry of Jane Joritz-Nakagawa, I am reminded of the sometimes bizarre syntax in writing produced by non-native speakers of English. For many years, Joritz-Nakagawa has taught in Japan where English words often appear in advertising and other forms of writing. This writing is frequently nonsensical, and yet strange juxtapositions and mistranslations may give new meaning to words, or result in inadvertent poetry.
Although the poems in Joritz-Nakagawa’s recently released collection, Aquiline (which follows last year’s Skin Museum) may strike the casual reader as nonsensical or incomprehensible, upon closer examination, it becomes clear that her choice of words is anything but inadvertent. She styles language into poems that force us to reconsider our preconceptions and that address many of our most immediate concerns.
For example, “dead,” which initially appeared in Her Circle Ezine, brings to mind the ravages of war, while “View from the Century Hyatt Hotel Tokyo” addresses the issue of homelessness. “Grey men in blue vinyl/ tents” are observed from a position of privilege and luxury. In “She,” the “bruises & large white sunglasses like/Jackie O” call up a battered woman.
“Evil Nature,” a four-part poem that comprises the core of this book, broods on human violence against nature, which has in turn made nature a menace to humankind. Instead of a nurturing Mother Nature, a haven of beauty and clean air, we now have “mechanic constellations” and “emotionally unavailable trees” along with “birds headed in the wrong direction” and “serial killing cloud.”
While her subjects may remain serious, Joritz-Nakagawa obviously takes delight in language, and reveals a sense of playfulness in her various experiments. In S.P. 1 and S.P. 2, she rearranges lines from poems by Sylvia Plath, coming up with “a crocodile of small girls.” “Evil Nature 4″ mixes the ideograms for cloud, forest, mountain and rain with suggestive phrases such as “To banish now the kiss, ancient.”
Experimental poetry is clearly not for everyone, but for those who are interested in expanding the limits of language, Joritz-Nakagawa is a poet worth reading. At turns stunning and shocking, Aquiline is an accomplished collection.
To order, write to info [at] printedmatterpress [dot] com
or visit the publisher’s website here.
Suzanne Kamata is the author of Losing Kei and the editor of the anthologies The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan and Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs.
