America & other poems by Nobuo Ayukawa and translated by Shogo Oketani

This is poetry from Japan.

America & other poems by Nobuo Ayukawa translated by Shogo Oketani is published by Kaya Press. This is a Book originally written in Japanese. This was published in 2008.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781885030412E12.

America & other poems, by Nobuo Ayukawa and translated by Shogo Oketani, brings postwar Japanese poetry into conversation with a charged geographic and cultural symbol. “America” is not merely a country in a title like this; it is power, occupation, fantasy, modernity, threat, promise, and projection. Ayukawa was an important figure in postwar Japanese modernist poetry, and the book gives English readers a way to encounter that historical pressure through lyric form. Oketani’s translation carries the work across the very linguistic and cultural divide the title invokes. I would read America & other poems for its uneasy address to influence and aftermath. The poems remind us that world literature is often made from contact that is anything but innocent.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.