Hazel Lozano

When I asked EJ Koh why she titled her debut poetry collection, A Lesser Love, she replied, “Lesser forms of love can still be considered as love.” Koh’s statement best embodies her aesthetic of poetic magnanimity, which, through most of the collection, pulls the subject back from the picture, scene, or image to interrogate the object’s point of view. “Where’s the compassion here? ‘Cause there’s always room for it, and where can it go? Because otherwise, what is the reader gaining from reading that?”

In her new book, 'Sachiko,' Caren Stelson deftly weaves Sachiko Yasui’s memories of living through the 1945 American bombing of Nagasaki with the global wartime perspective. We follow then-six-year-old Sachiko through the aftermath of that bombing, and witness devastating losses accumulate in an otherwise quiet life of someone forever marked as “hibakusha”: a survivor of atomic bombing.