Book record
Factory girls
Takako Arai
Translated from Japanese by Carol Hayes
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.
- Published
- 2019
- Publisher
- Action Books
- Language
- Japanese
- Country
- Japan
- ISBN
- 9780900575846