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The ninth volume in Vagabond Press's Asia Pacific Series. This collection brings together the work of three of Japan's most creative, innovative, and challenging contemporary poets. During the 1980s, It and Hirata quickly emerged as major new poetic voices, breaking taboos and writing about sexual desire, marital strife, pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood in such direct and powerful ways that they sent shockwaves through the literary establishment. In recent years, Arai has emerged as a leader of the next generation of poets, writing about working-class women and their fates within the world of global capital. All three poets have rejected the stayed, polished language that dominates poetic discourse and instead have favored dramatic voices that are raw, powerful, and frequently quite dark. Socially engaged and poetically aware, these three are poised to become some of the most important poetic voices of the twenty-first century. For more information visit: www.vagabondpress.net"
Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. Women's Studies. Translated by Jeffrey Angles, Jen Crawford, Carol Hayes, Rina Kikuchi, You Sakai, Sawako Nakayaso. This first English-language volume from Japanese poet, performer and publisher Takako Arai collects engaging, rhythmically intense narrative poems set in the silk weaving factory where Arai grew up. FACTORY GIRLS depicts the secretive yet bold world of the women workers as well as the fate of these kinds of regional, feminine, collaborative spaces in a current-day Japan defined by such corporate and climate catastrophes as the rise of Uniqlo and the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster.
What do we think of when we think of literary critics? Enlightenment snobs in powdered wigs? Professional experts? Cloistered academics? Through the end of the 20th century, book review columns and literary magazines held onto an evolving but stable critical paradigm, premised on expertise, objectivity, and carefully measured response. And then the Internet happened. From the editors of Review 31 and 3:AM Magazine, The Digital Critic brings together a diverse group of perspectives—early-adopters, Internet skeptics, bloggers, novelists, editors, and others—to address the future of literature and scholarship in a world of Facebook likes, Twitter wars, and Amazon book reviews. It takes stock of the so-called Literary Internet up to the present moment, and considers the future of criticism: its promise, its threats of decline, and its mutation, perhaps, into something else entirely. With contributions from Robert Barry, Russell Bennetts, Michael Bhaskar, Louis Bury, Lauren Elkin, Scott Esposito, Marc Farrant, Orit Gat, Thea Hawlin, Ellen Jones, Anna Kiernan, Luke Neima, Will Self, Jonathon Sturgeon, Sara Veale, Laura Waddell, and Joanna Walsh.
Poetry. Translated from the Japanese by Sawako Nakayasu, Ryoko Sekiguchi and Cole Swensen. This revolutionary volume represents the first book of its kind, a bilingual anthology dedicated to women working in modern and cross cultural poetry milieus. Published collaboratively by Belladonna Books and Litmus Press in honor of the Festival of Contemporary Japanese Women Poets with support by NYSCA.
One of Japan’s most important modern poets, Tada Chimako (1930–2003) gained prominence in her native country for her sensual, frequently surreal poetry and fantastic imagery. Although Tada’s writing is an essential part of postwar Japanese poetry, her use of themes and motifs from European, Near Eastern, and Mediterranean history, mythology, and literature, as well as her sensitive explorations of women’s inner lives make her very much a poet of the world. Forest of Eyes offers English-language readers their first opportunity to read a wide selection from Tada’s extraordinary oeuvre, including nontraditional free verse, poems in the traditional forms of tanka and haiku, and prose poems. Translator Jeffrey Angles introduces this collection with an incisive essay that situates Tada as a poet, explores her unique style, and analyzes her contribution to the representation of women in postwar Japanese literature.
The natural and man-made cataclysmic events of the 11 March 2011 disaster, or 3.11, have dramatically altered the status quo of contemporary Japanese society. While much has been written about the social, political, economic, and technical aspects of the disaster, this volume represents one of the first in-depth explorations of the cultural responses to the devastating tsunami, and in particular the ongoing nuclear disaster of Fukushima. This book explores a wide range of cultural responses to the Fukushima nuclear calamity by analyzing examples from literature, poetry, manga, theatre, art photography, documentary and fiction film, and popular music. Individual chapters examine the changing ...
Poetry. East Asian Studies. Translated from the Japanese by Jeffrey Angles. "I want to get rid of Kanoko/I want to get rid of filthy little Kanoko/I want to get rid of or kill Kanoko who bites off my nipples." "KILLING KANOKO is a powerful, long-overdue collection (in fine translation) of poetry from the radical Japanese feminist poet, Hiromi Ito. Her poems reverberate with sexual candor, the exigencies and delights of the paradoxically restless/rooted female body, and the visceral imagery of childbirth leap off the page as performative modal structures fierce, witty, and vibrant. Hiromi is a true sister of the Beats" Anne Waldman."
Literature after Fukushima examines how aesthetic representation contributes to a critical understanding of the 3.11 triple disaster – the Great East Japan earthquake, tsunami, and multiple meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Through an examination of key works in the expanding corpus of 3.11 literature the book explores how the disaster—both its immediate aftereffects and its continued unfolding—reframed discourse in various areas such as trauma studies, eco-criticism, regional identity, food safety, civil society, and beyond. Individual chapters discuss aspects of these perspectival shifts, tracing the reshaping of Japanese identity after the triple disaster. The ...