Some Girls Walk into the Country They Are From

Product Description In Sawako Nakayasu’s first poetry collection in seven years, an unsettling diaspora of “girls” is deployed as poetic form, as reclamation of diminutive pseudo-slur, and as characters that take up residence between the thick border zones of language, culture, and shifting identity. Written in response to Nakayasu’s 2017 return to the US, this maximalist collection invites us to reexamine our own complicity in reinforcing literary convention. The book radicalizes notions of “translation” as both process and product, running a kind of linguistic interference that is intimate, feminist, and playfully jagged. Review Nakayasu uses words to construct a space, often an intimate one between the writer and reader, the lover and the beloved, friends.--John Yau, HyperallergenicNakayasu writes intentionally on the fence of genres and further blurs the lines among literary forms, something that--regardless of our tendency to categorize and in spite of any genre purists left in our blurry, blurry world--enchants us as readers and excites us craft-wise as writers. --Michelle Dove, the Small Press Book ReviewNakayasu's hypnotic thrust is at times reminiscent of the musical minimalism of composers like Phillip Glass or Steve Reich. Yet she avoids total abstraction just as she avoids hermeticism. --Laura Wright, American Book Review Review Nakayasu uses words to construct a space, often an intimate one between the writer and reader, the lover and the beloved, friends.―John Yau, HyperallergenicNakayasu's hypnotic thrust is at times reminiscent of the musical minimalism of composers like Phillip Glass or Steve Reich. Yet she avoids total abstraction just as she avoids hermeticism. ―Laura Wright, American Book ReviewNakayasu writes intentionally on the fence of genres and further blurs the lines among literary forms, something that―regardless of our tendency to categorize and in spite of any genre purists left in our blurry, blurry world―enchants us as readers and excites us craft-wise as writers. ––Michelle Dove, the Small Press Book Review About the Author Sawako Nakayasu is an artist working with language, performance, and translation – separately and in various combinations. She has lived mostly in the US and Japan, briefly in France and China, and translates from Japanese. Her books include Pink Waves (forthcoming, Omnidawn), The Ants (Les Figues Press), Texture Notes (Letter Machine Editions), and the translation of The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa (Canarium Books), as well as Mouth: Eats Color – Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-translations, & Originals (reprint forthcoming, Wave Books), a multilingual work of both original and translated poetry. She is co-editor, with Eric Selland, of an anthology of 20th Century Japanese Poetry (forthcoming, New Directions). She teaches at Brown University. Website: http://www.sawakonakayasu.net/ Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. GIRL SOUP I get tired of being the one to make all the decisions so when they ask me where I want to eat, I say that I don’t care, I’d eat anything at this point. Next thing I know, I am face to face with a bowl of Girl Soup and I just can’t bring myself. Some of us at the table are in a hurry to eat the soup, they are specifically trying to eat the girls quickly because they seem to know that if you wait too long they turn into cyborgs or robots, and those are harder to chew. I can see that some of the girls are still alive and perhaps would like to be extracted from the soup, but when I squint I see that there are girls all over the floor with varying amounts of soup clinging to their clothes (you didn’t think they were naked, did you?) and so there goes that idea. Just at the moment I think I am running out of options, something comes over me and I take a deep breath and I do it, I jump right in there, that bowl of Girl Soup, no one is checking IDs or questioning my size or gender or race