Factory girls by Takako Arai and translated by Jen Crawford, Carol Hayes, Rina Kikuchi, You Nakai Jeffrey Angles, Sawako Nakayasu

This is poetry from Japan.

Factory girls by Takako Arai translated by Jen Crawford, Carol Hayes, Rina Kikuchi, You Nakai Jeffrey Angles, Sawako Nakayasu is published by Action Books. This is a Book originally written in Japanese. This was published in 2019.0 and has the ISBN of 9.780900575846E12.

Factory girls, by Takako Arai and translated by Jen Crawford, Carol Hayes, Rina Kikuchi, You Nakai, Jeffrey Angles, and Sawako Nakayasu, is a Japanese collection whose translator list already suggests a polyphonic act of carrying voices across. Arai’s work often engages labor, industry, gender, and the lives of women shaped by economic systems. The title points toward factory space, but also toward youth, exploitation, solidarity, and the body under repetitive pressure. I would read Factory girls for its refusal to separate lyric from work. The poem can contain machines, shifts, exhaustion, gossip, danger, and tenderness. Multiple translators feel appropriate for a book about collective conditions. This is not poetry as escape from labor, but poetry as a way to hear the people inside it.

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.