The best books about history are those that are also about the future. W. Todd Kaneko’ s marvelous This is How the Bone Sings is more than a mere song— it is a singing across time and distance. In lyrics both personal and political, Kaneko composes a score that spans four generations, connecting his grandparents, who were prisoners in the unfathomable Minidoka concentration camps, to his young son and this unfathomable era in which he was born. One of the many things I lo...
This volume presents translations of over 200 poems by Shotetsu, who is generally considered to be the last great poet of the uta form. Includes an introduction, a glossary of important names and places and a list of sources of the poems.
Favor of Crows is a collection of new and previously published original haiku poems over the past forty years. Gerald Vizenor has earned a wide and devoted audience for his poetry. In the introductory essay the author compares the imagistic poise of haiku with the early dream songs of the Anishinaabe, or Chippewa. Vizenor concentrates on these two artistic traditions, and by intuition he creates a union of vision, perception, and natural motion in concise poems; he creates a sense of presence an...
The Japanese Conquest of American Opinion (Asian Experience in North America)
by Montaville Flowers
The Spring of My Life (Shambhala Pocket Library)
by Sam Hamill and Issa Kobayashi
An autobiographical blend of prose and haiku from one of Japan's greatest poets. Kobayashi Issa (1763–1827), along with Bashō and Buson, is considered one of the three greatest haiku poets of Japan, known for his attention to poignant detail and playful sense of humor. Issa’s most beloved work, The Spring of My Life, is an autobiographical sketch of linked prose and haiku in the tradition of Bashō’s celebrated Narrow Road to the Interior. This edition also includes more than 160 of Issa’s most...
Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged) (Miller Williams Poetry Prize)
by Judy Halebsky
Finalist, 2020 Miller Williams Poetry Prize Inspired by Matsuo Basho's writings and teachings on poetics and haiku, the interrelated lyric poems in Sky of Wu investigate work and marriage, the question of becoming a parent while watching a parent age into dementia, and the realities of wrestling with inequality, pollution, and habitat loss while navigating everyday life in Oakland, California. Simultaneously, they converse with Chinese poets from the eighth century and Japanese writers from th...
The first major poetry collection from an award-winning student of Robert Pinsky, exploring the inherited trauma within his Japanese American family, his life as an artist, and his bond with his wife In 65 lyric poems organized into a triptych, Common Grace offers an important new lens into Asian American life, art, and love. Part 1, “Soul Sauce,” describes the poet’s life as a practicing visual artist, taking us from an early encounter with an inkwell at Roseland Elementary in 1969 to his pro...
Shortlisted for the 2024 City of Victoria Butler Book Prize A vivid, expansive vision of intergenerational witness and repair. The village is tilting on its axis. It is turning. All its organs are spilling into the bay. shima is a mosaic of the emotional, psychic, and generational toll that exile from a pillaged culture impresses on a poet and his community. Come to haunt yamagushiku’s practice of ancestor veneration are photographs and a narrative that spans his own life and a mythic paralle...
"Patricia Donegan and Yoshie Ishibashi are to be deeply thanked for having given us with such articulate care a poetry major in any language and in any place or time." —Robert Creeley, poet Chiyo-ni (1703-1775), also known as Kaga no Chiyo, is Japan's most celebrated female haiku poet. A student of Basho's disciples, she worked in an age when haiku was largely a male domain. As a poet, painter, and Buddhist nun, she lived a vibrant life while creating poems of crystalline clarity and delicate s...
