Descendants

Nikkei Poetry from the Afterlife of Wartime Incarceration

Edited by Brynn Saito and Brandon Shimoda

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Description

An anthology of poetry on Nikkei incarceration, written by descendants of the WWII prisons and camps
A tribute to the 150,000 people harmed by the United States and Canada during WWII, this anthology is the first of its kind. Its poets express a range of experiences and perspectives from the afterlife of this historical yet enduring injustice through poetry. With a foreword by acclaimed poet, activist, and concentration camp survivor, Mitsuye Yamada, and an introduction by the editors, Brynn Saito and Brandon Shimoda, Descendants explores intergenerational trauma as the contributors, all descendants themselves, sift through an intimate record of wartime incarceration.
Contributors to this anthology include poets of Japanese American, Japanese Canadian, Okinawan American, Okinawan Canadian, Japanese Hawaiian, Alaska Native/Tlingit, mixed race Nikkei, and Japanese descent. These poems inhabit and retell the story of incarceration and its many legacies, through a diversity of modes and themes, creating a kaleidoscopic whole exploring anti-Asian racism, assimilation, loyalty, resistance, and redemption. The anthology illuminates individual perspectives and reveals collective experience. It insists upon the imperative of poetry in the processes of solidarity and transgenerational healing.

Author Bios

Brandon Shimoda is the author of nine books of poetry and prose, including Hydra Medusa (Nightboat Books, 2023), The Grave on the Wall (City Lights, 2019), which received the PEN Open Book Award, and Evening Oracle (Letter Machine Editions, 2015), which received the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. His next book is on the afterlife of Japanese American incarceration, and is forthcoming from City Lights in 2024. His writing has been published in BOMB, Brick, Harper’s, The Nation, The New York Times, and Poetry, among other venues. Brynn Saito is the author of Under a Future Sky (2023), Power Made Us Swoon (2016) and The Palace of Contemplating Departure (2013), winner of the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award and a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. She has received grant support from Densho, Hedgebrook, and the Santa Fe Art Institute. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times and American Poetry Review and she was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and the Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award. Brynn lives in the traditional homelands of the Yokuts and Mono peoples (also known as Fresno, CA), where she teaches in the MFA program at California State University, Fresno.

Reviews

Praise for Hydra Medusa by Brandon Shimoda
“The essays, poems and talks in Hydra Medusa testify to the heroic dream-work of literary resistance in its many forms."
—Srikanth Reddy, The Washington Post
"Shimoda's book is a tour de force... a sometimes melancholic, sometimes incantatory meditation on the evil that people can do."
—Gregory McNamee, 2024 Southwest Books of the Year
"Brandon Shimoda is a mystic poet. Hydra Medusa is an otherworldly book."
—Sean McCoy, The Brooklyn Rail
Praise for Under a Future Sky by Brynn Saito
“Brynn Saito writes with a rare, inimitable grace in her most personal and politically engaged book to date. I feel more alive after these poems…”
—Lee Herrick, author of Scar and Flower
“Lyrically lush and deeply wise, this book is both an intimate portrait and a summoning, a chance to hunt memory and recover history, still burning, still stone.”
—Traci Brimhall, author of Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod

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Descendants

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Other books by the authors

The Gate of Memory