Tarisa Matsumoto
An inheritance of memory: Kaneko brings back the dead
These days, we can fill an entire library with poetry collections built on the trauma of the incarceration of people of Japanese ancestry during World War II. As W. Todd Kaneko writes in the...
Listening to goddesses: Jennifer S. Cheng’s map of myth
Here in the Pacific Northwest, there are nights when the moon plays hide-and-seek with the clouds, and there are bright days when the moon flits across a sunny sky. There are times when the...
A son’s memorial to his mother: Lawrence Matsuda’s “My Name is Not Viola”
There is a mystique about novels that bring a bygone Seattle into view. John Okada’s No-No Boy has it. Jamie Ford’s Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet has it. And now, Lawrence...
The great matriarch: A portrait of poet Marilyn Chin
I’ve long been a fan of Marilyn Chin. It seems like only yesterday that I read her poem “How I Got That Name” for the first time. That poem was a revelation. A poet...
Writing Trauma: The Nisei Voice of Suma Yagi
There is a unique psychology among the Nisei, the American-born children of Japanese immigrants, most of whom came of age during World War II. I have witnessed it in my own family, in my...
Amy Uyematsu’s The Yellow Door a celebration of resistance
Before I arrived in Seattle, I thought that moving here would be like returning to my Southern California home—all Asian Americans and Japanese American towns. But when I got here, it wasn’t the mecca...
Amy Uyematsu’s ‘The Yellow Door’ a celebration of resistance
The collection’s theme is the idea of yellow, not only as color but as a marker of identity, both reviled and empowering.
A Testament to that Life Islanded: A Retrospective of Lonny Kaneko
A look at Coming Home from Camp and Other Poems
Circling back the lineage in Brian Komei Dempster’s ‘Topaz’
Poet makes several stops in Seattle