The Colors of Desire: Poems

by David Mura

Overview

A collection of poems by the author of Turning Japanese, exploring race and sexuality, history and identity, through the lens of desire.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307788023
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/30/2011
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	2 MB

Editorial Reviews

Mura used two powerful motifs to unify this work: his Japanese American heritage and his own sexual history. The motifs are connected because Mura, as a Sansei (third-generation Japanese American), is fascinated by "whiteness." The Japanese half of his "doubled" existence is evoked by images of government internment camps that held his grandparents and other Issei (first-generation Japanese Americans), as well as scenes from his own childhood reverberating with "shouts of chink and/gook." The erotic side of Mura surfaces in disturbing poems about voyeurism and pornography-and in a complex pair of long poems entitled "The Affair I and It," where a man and a woman discover the strange linkage of sex and self. Mura ends this poignant book with a poem to his daughter, Samantha, child of two races and a living symbol of "unbroken/joy." Highly recommended.-Daniel L. Guillory, Dept. of English, Millikin Univ., Decatur, Ill.

Library Journal

The powerful poems of Mura's impressive second collection possess a brutality beneath the sweetness of their language. In his first book, Mura explored cultural, social, and political issues with an objective eye; here he turns the focus inward and expertly examines the boundaries of his identity as a sexual Japanese man. Race and eroticism twine around each other in many poems, and Mura refuses to shy away from the shadowy parts of himself. He elegantly confesses his experiences inside an X-rated film booth and of "touching himself" so much when he was 12 that his father asked him to read a medical pamphlet about it. In the longest sequence here, "The Affair," he presents a wrenching adultery involving an Asian American man and a married Caucasian woman; Mura plunges beneath the surface of mere betrayal to comment on race, identity, sex, and pain. Intelligent and passionate, Mura bares his soul and amazes his readers with the beauty and darkness in his work.

Elizabeth Gunderson