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The before, the after, and the event that divides. In Irradiated Cities, Mariko Nagai seeks the dividing events of nuclear catastrophe in Japan, exploring the aftermath of the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima. Nagai's lyric textual fragments and stark black and white photographs act as a guide through these spaces of loss, silence, echo, devastation, and memory. And haunting each shard and each page an enduring irradiation, the deadly residue of catastrophe that leaks into our DNA. Winner of the 2015 NOS Book Contest, as selected by guest judge lê thi diem thúy.
"Necessary for all of humankind, Under the Broken Sky is a breathtaking work of literature."—Booklist, starred review A beautifully told middle-grade novel-in-verse about a Japanese orphan’s experience in occupied rural Manchuria during World War II. Twelve-year-old Natsu and her family live a quiet farm life in Manchuria, near the border of the Soviet Union. But the life they’ve known begins to unravel when her father is recruited to the Japanese army, and Natsu and her little sister, Cricket, are left orphaned and destitute. In a desperate move to keep her sister alive, Natsu sells Cricket to a Russian family following the 1945 Soviet occupation. The journey to redemption for Natsu's broken family is rife with struggles, but Natsu is tenacious and will stop at nothing to get her little sister back. Literary and historically insightful, this is one of the great untold stories of WWII. Much like the Newbery Honor book Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai, Mariko Nagai's Under the Broken Sky is powerful, poignant, and ultimately hopeful. Christy Ottaviano Books
In 1942, 13-year-old Mina Masako Tagawa and her Japanese American family are sent from their home in Seattle to an internment camp in Idaho. All they can do is wonder when America will remember that they, too, are Americans. This memorable and powerful novel in verse, written by award-winning author Mariko Nagai, explores the nature of fear, the beauty of life, and the hope of acceptance triumphing over bigotry.
"These stories, based on Japanese folktales and history are all tied to agricultural life, and depict themes of survival through famine, war, religious persecution, and sexual slavery"--Provided by publisher.
In the aftermath of a major earthquake, eleven-year-old Maya overcomes her own fear to help others at home and in northeast Japan, where a tsunami caused great damage. Includes author's note about the facts behind the story.
Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice vigorously engages with the Why? and the How? of prose poetry, a form that is currently enjoying a surge in popularity. With contributions by both practitioners and academics, this volume seeks to explore how its distinctive properties guide both writer and reader, and to address why this form is so well suited to the early twenty-first century. With discussion of both classic and less well- known writers, the essays both illuminate prose poetry’s distinctive features and explore how this "outsider" form can offer a unique way of viewing and describing the uncertainties and instabilities which shape our identities and our relationships with our surroundings in the early twenty-first century. Combining insights on the theory and practice of prose poetry, Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice offers a timely and valuable contribution to the development of the form, and its appreciation amongst practitioners and scholars alike. Largely approached from a practitioner perspective, this collection provides vivid snapshots of contemporary debates within the prose poetry field while actively contributing to the poetics and craft of the form.
Sparrows. Migration. Borders. Bodies. Blurring languages and metamorphosizing landscapes. In Histories of Bodies, Mariko Nagai traces the memory of loss, grief, death and family, seeking to define love in its multifaceted manifestations, each definition shifting, taking flight, then landing, only to be exiled out of the origin. From New York to Amsterdam to Boston to Tokyo, each landscape, whether temporal or imaginary, is rendered out of memory, then wrought into unsettling language of sorrow. In these poems, the world is consistently shifting, and what remains, at the end, is temporary migration of a sparrow, suddenly landing, then disappearing into the urban landscape.
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At the height of the Incan empire, a girl called the Ugly One because of a disfiguring scar on her face, seeks to have the scar removed and instead finds a life path as a shaman.
The author takes readers on a fascinating journey back to A.D. 100, where a bolt of sky blue silk is carried by successive caravans from China to Rome along the ancient Silk Road. The narrators include a brave, young caravan leader from China; a merchant and his preteen son from Turkmenistan; a gifted camel guide from the Middle East; a family of women from Egypt; and citizens in Rome.