My Funeral Gondola

by Fiona Sze-Lorrain

Mānoa Books and El León Literary Arts, 2013

Melissa Kwansy writes that the poems in Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s second collection of poetry, My Funeral Gondola, “navigate the swells of loss…I recognize this speech, haunting and strange, the speech of true poets.”

In My Funeral Gondola, Sze-Lorrain takes on departures and rifts in a lyrical voice that reclaims the personal and the universal. As if to subvert expectations in narrative, memory and experience, these poems speak through their restraint to the meditations, bittersweet struggles, and inner intensities of an existence that trusts the music, the distance, and the timeless.

Sze-Lorrain’s debut collection of poetry, Water the Moon, was published in 2010. In addition to her books of translation of Chinese poets from Zephyr Press, she has translated several contemporary French and American authors and co-edited the Mãnoa/University of Hawai’i Press anthologies Sky Lanterns (summer 2012) and On Freedom (winter 2012). An editor at Cerise Press and Vif éditions, she is also a zheng harpist and orchid healer.

A Japanese Girl Speaks

by Mari Kubo
Finishing Line Press, 2013

In her new poetry chapbook, A Japanese Girl Speaks (forthcoming from Finishing Line Press), Mari Kubo “[expresses] the magic in ordinary moments with delicate images and sly humor” (Dana Naone Hall).

Mari Kubo was raised in Hilo and Honolulu, Hawai’i, and began writing poetry and fiction in her youth. She received her undergraduate degree in English from the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, and her MA in Creative Writing from Boston University. Her poems and fiction have been published at both the state and national levels. She currently lives in Hilo.

How to Live on the Planet Earth: Collected Poems

by Nanao Sasaki
Blackberry Books, 2013

How to Live on the Planet Earth is the most extensive collection of Japanese poet Nanao Sakaki’s work, containing poems from the previously published volumes Bellyfulls (1966), Real Play (1981), Break the Mirror (1987), and Let’s Eat Stars (1997). The book’s final section also features over one hundred pages of new work, written before Sakaki’s passing in 2008.

In his introduction to How to Live on Planet Earth, Pulitzer Prize winner Gary Synder describes Sakaki as “a uniquely free and bold-spirited wanderer, occasional river or mountain activist, singer and chanter, and internationally published poet.” Born in Kagoshima Prefecture, Sakaki grew up in pre-war Japan and served in World War II. In the early 1950s, he began studying English, immersing himself in nature, and writing poetry. In the late 1960s, he began making visits to the United States, around California and New Mexico. At the time of his death, Nagano was living with acquaintances in the mountainous areas of Nagano Prefecture, Japan.

A Possible Bag

by Andrew Schelling
Singing Horse Press, 2013

Following the trail he set out on in From he Arapaho Songbook, the poems in Andrew Schelling’s A Possible Bag take us further into the recesses of the Southern Rocky Mountain bioregion, tracking the remnants of the Arapaho language that was once the native tongue of that terrain.

A translator, poet, ecologist, and explorer, Andrew Schelling was raised in New England, but relocated to Northern California in the early 1970s, where he studied Sanskrit and Asian literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He has explored and traveled extensively throughout North America, Europe, and South Asia, and currently lives near the Southern Rocky mountains, in Boulder, Colorado, where he teaches poetry, Sanskrit, and nature writing at Naropa University.

Wind Says

selected poems by Bai Hua
translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain
Zephyr Press, The Chinese University Press of Hong Kong,
and Brookline Mass | Hong Kong

Considered a central literary figure of the post-Obscure (or post-”Misty”) poetry movement during the 1980s, Bai Hua is one of the most influential poets in contemporary China. Born in 1956 in Chongqing, he studied English literature at Guangzhou Foreign Language Institute before graduating with a Master’s degree in Western Literary History from Sichuan University. His first collection of poems, Expression (1988), received immediate critical acclaim.  Bai Hua’s poetic output is considerably modest but selective; in the past thirty years he has written only about ninety poems. After a decade-long silence, he began writing poetry again in 2007. That same year, his work garnered the prestigious Rougang Poetry Award. A prolific writer of critical prose and hybrid texts, Bai Hua is also a recipient of the Anne Kao Poetry Prize. Currently living in Chengdu, Sichuan, he teaches at the Southwest Jiaotong University.

Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s debut collection of poetry, Water the Moon, was published in 2010. In addition to her books of translation of Chinese poets from Zephyr Press, she has translated several contemporary French and American authors, and co-edited the Manoa anthology, Sky Lanterns (University of Hawai’i Press, 2012). An editor at Cerise Press and Vif éditions, she lives in Paris. (adapted from inside cover)

Bai Hua and Fiona Sze-Lorrain are proudly featured in Sky Lanterns. Bai Hua’s poetic style, potent and complex, when paired with Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s remarkable talent for translation continues to be a pleasure to read in Wind Says. The English poems in Wind Says appear along side their Chinese originals, so this small collection is perfect for people who read both English and/or Chinese texts. Also, the poetry in this collection is ordered chronologically, just like the collection by Shi Zhi mentioned on this site. Likewise, Bai Hua’s evolution as a poet between the book’s first poem dated 1984 and its last, dated 2010, is apparent and inspiring.

Verge 2012, Inverse

Edited by Samantha Clifford & Rosalind McFarlane
Monash University Publishing

Verge, started in 2005, is Monash University’s annual anthology of creative writing. It features work from Monash University’s brightest writers and poets alongside other works from some of Australia’s notable writers. Edited by Samantha Clifford and Rosalind McFarlane, this year’s edition of Verge is concerned with boundaries and writing against and beyond them. Writers for this issue were asked to consider the idea of “inverse” in their work. (adapted form back cover)

Upon opening this issue of Verge, the image, created by Stephanie Yap, of two women cloaked in black burkas superimposed over a collage of yellow carnations is what greets you. The geometric lines, as they clash with the curved lines of the women’s figures, create an illusion of depth. The final image in the issue is an abstract painting by Jenny Luong, titled “Inverse.” Its shapes are somehow fish-like and insect-like, while at the same time elephantine. Both pieces highlight the notion that between one thing and its inverse exists a boundary that is as concrete as it is permeable.

The poems and prose in the issue expand on this notion. In the middle of the issue is a short comic by “Rouge et Noir” by Bruce Mutard. The story Mutard tells is of racial conflict amongst military men and gender roles in the public sphere and how these conflicts manifest themselves during a night out on the town.

My Postwar Life

edited by Elizabeth McKenzie
foreword by Karen Tei Yamashita
Chicago Quarterly Review Books

My Postwar Life is a collection of new writing from Japan and Okinawa. “This selection of new work by some of Japan and okinawa’s most eminent observers and artists offers a richly nuanced prspective on the relationship between Japan and the U.S. in the long aftermath of the war.” (taken from the back cover)

The collection includes fiction, poetry, and essays by authors Deni Y. Bechard, Christopher Yohmei Blasdel, Hiroshi Fukurai, Ryuta Imafuku, Setsuko Ishiguro, Roland Kelts, Mari Kotani,  Janice Nakao, Kim Shi-Jong, Keijiro Suga, Iona Sugihara, Goro Takano, Stewart Wachs, Stephen Woodhams, and Kentaro Yamaki.

A few of the the authors, such as Leza Lowitz, Shogo Oketani, Tami Sakiyama, Takayuki Tatsumi, and Katsunori Yamazato are past contributors to the MĀNOA Journal.

Also included in My Postwar Life is a play by Masataka Matsuda, an interview with the former mayor of Nagasaki Hitoshi Motoshima, photography by Shomei Tomatsu, and a series of scans made from the illustrated journal of a soldier in the Imperial Army.

The image that opens the collection is a photograph of a piece of debris from ground zero in Nagasaki. It is the face of a wristwatch, without the straps, its hands stuck forever at 11:02 am—the hour and minute the bomb landed. Like this small timepiece, so much of our collective imagination about Japan is stuck in time looking at a mushroom cloud. However, unlike the recovered wristwatch, life in Japan and Okinawa went on. My Postwar Life is a beautiful bit of proof that it carried onward, and is something to be celebrated.