Anon

by Sophia Terazawa

Overview

A collection of love poems addressed to an adverb, Anon meditates on the temporal “at once” between desire and language. 

From the playful verses of Slovenia's Tomaž Šalamun to the brushstrokes of an Edo period painting, Two Gibbons Reaching for the Moon by Japan's Ito Jakuchu, a character for the displaced Beloved emerges in this tapestry of time and art across borders. 

In Anon, the Beloved reflects:  How might translating a human experience, from one language to the next, be an act of longing for the anonymous Other? Or how might this longing for beauty, and the wordless face, heal us both? How might Eros, in exile, respond? With these questions, Vietnam's Mekong delta becomes the book's central force. Endangered gibbons swing from the ruins of ecocide, and each image―rose, ape, and river―weaves itself into an undercurrent of postcolonial time. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781646052479
Publisher:	Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication date:	03/21/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	140
File size:	10 MB

About the Author

Sophia Terazawa is the author of two poetry collections with Deep Vellum, along with two chapbooks, I AM NOT A WAR (Essay Press), a winner of the 2015 Essay Press Digital Chapbook Contest, and Correspondent Medley (Factory Hollow Press), winner of the 2018 Tomaž Šalamun Prize. She's a graduate of the University of Arizona's MFA program, where she also served as Poetry Editor of Sonora Review. She currently teaches at Virginia Tech.

Editorial Reviews

07/24/2023

In her sensuous second collection, Terazawa (Winter Phoenix) addresses a series of love poems to the adverb anon across four lyrical sections that meditate on themes of romance, colonialism, violence, and loss. The opening poem, “Stay,” begins: “For the muse could not/ light another city// with her eyes, you spoke/ anon, oil black like mine,// and whoever crossed/ that cobbler’s// bridge in Ljubljana/ would also speak of roots.” “Walk with me, anon,” she writes, taking this unnamed addressee to a garden “vergrown with books” through “each decade of grief.” These deeply felt poems are filled with images of gibbons, rivers, and roses. Indeed, the speaker writes, “We could have dreamed of roses.” With haunting imagery, Terazawa describes a world where one’s “present tense arrived misshapen” in settings ravaged by war or climate change. “Kids are dying,// in your country and my country, too,” she proclaims. These poems tackle the challenges and atrocities of the present with an eye to the past and an insistence on beauty. Terazawa’s lush imagination gorgeously renders the interconnectedness of a difficult world. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly