Wild Grass on the Riverbank

by Hiromi Ito, Jeffrey Angles (Translator)

Overview

Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. Women's Studies. Translated from the Japanese by Jeffrey Angles. Set simultaneously in the California desert and her native Japan, tracking migrant children who may or may not be human, or alive, Hiromi Itō's WILD GRASS ON THE RIVERBANK will plunge you into dreamlike landscapes of volatile proliferation: shape-shifting mothers, living father-corpses, and pervasively odd vegetation. At once grotesque and vertiginous, Itō interweaves mythologies, language, sexuality, and place into a genre-busting narrative of what it is to be a migrant.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780989804844
Publisher:	Action Books
Publication date:	01/01/2015
Edition description:	Translatio
Pages:	103
Product dimensions:	6.80(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.10(d)

About the Author

Hiromi Itō emerged in the 1980s as the leading voice of Japanese women's poetry with a series of sensational works that depicted women's psychology, sexuality, and motherhood in fresh and dramatic new ways. In the late 1990s, she relocated to southern California, and since then has written a number of important, award-winning books about migrancy, relocation, identity, linguistic alienation, aging, and death. Her collection Kawara Arekusa won the 2006 Takami Jun Prize, which is awarded each year to an outstanding, innovative book of poetry, and is now published in English translation (WILD GRASS ON THE RIVERBANK, 2015), by Action Books. A selection of her early work appears in KILLING KANOKO: SELECTED POEMS OF HIROMI ITō (Action Books, 2009). Both collections are translated by Jeffrey Angles.

Jeffrey Angles lives in Kalamazoo, where he is an associate professor of Japanese and translation at Western Michigan University. He is the author of Writing the Love of Boys (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and the award-winning translator of dozens of Japan's most important modern Japanese authors and poets.

Editorial Reviews

01/19/2015
Acclaimed Japanese poet Ito follows up her English-language debut, Killing Kanoko, with a narrative poem in which a horrifying wasteland of personified plants and rotting corpses provides the landscape. In the poem, which is told from the perspective of a girl traveling with her siblings as her mother gives poetry readings (the text of which comes from Ito’s earlier work), the family eventually settles alongside a nightmarish riverbank where the brother’s skin erupts in pus-filled blisters, the children’s stepfather turns into a writhing corpse, and the mother copulates with vines. The book shifts from prose to verse and back, finding a stylized, childlike repetition: “At the roots of the different types of grass/ The corpses were buried/ Lots of corpses were buried/ Corpses of grass and corpses of animals.” The accomplished translation does justice to the original text, which won the Takami June Prize in Japan, and the generous introduction is useful for those unfamiliar with Ito’s unique blend of Japanese and English literary traditions, including her reworking of the medieval story-telling genre sekkyo-bushi and her taxonomic engagement with plants. Bizarrely alluring, the narrative poem reconstitutes femininity, immigration, sex, and nature, with defamiliarization being the first step in an innovative push forward. (Jan.)

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