Expansions

Micah Tasaka’s debut poetry collection, Expansions, aches with a sense of honeyed tenderness, generosity, and a corporeal wisdom for the lost and for those suffering losses; for those forging their own mythologies; and for those who are learning that “[...] love is freedom / love is / watering the seeds / on the windowsill / and cheering / for every sprout / to reach onward / from the dirt / towards the sky.”  These poems are those leafy sprouts that expand with the big questions about faith, ritual, love, queerness, the soul and transformation.  Tasaka’s poems are also a healing balm of reverential kisses “for all we both / had to endure / sneaking through/ clipped fences / storm the / pearly gates and / ash on the / golden streets” and a veritable atomic bomb: “I will make a / mess of things / splintering even / the parts you thought were so sturdy.”  With lyric precision, explosive form, and a keen ear for music, Tasaka’s poems are not to be missed. Rachelle Cruz, author of God’s Will for Monsters. Micah Tasaka’s Expansions is a collection that interweaves style and song of both spoken word poet and healer. With poems that boldly confront intimate and queer narratives of trauma, loss, faith and heart break, Tasaka’s poems are prayers and incantations of mourning, shedding and cleansing— at times, the voice spirals into dreamscape, surrenders to the quietude of nature or reveals the raw vulnerability of tender pain, either way their poems fiercely seek agency, transformation and renewal. Angela Peñaredondo, author of All Things Lose Thousands of Time.