Spiral Staircase by Hirato Renkichi and translated by Sho Sugita

This is poetry from Japan.

Spiral Staircase by Hirato Renkichi translated by Sho Sugita is published by Ugly Duckling Presse. This is a Book originally written in Japanese. This was published in 2017.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781937027667E12.

Spiral Staircase, by Hirato Renkichi and translated by Sho Sugita, brings English-language readers toward Japanese modernism and its restless mechanical imagination. Renkichi is associated with Futurist energy, and the title feels perfect for a poet interested in motion that does not move in a straight line. A spiral staircase rises, repeats, disorients, and offers progress without the comfort of simplicity. I would read this as a book of velocity and angle, a poetry of the machine age refracted through the body’s own vertigo. Sugita’s translation matters because historical avant-garde work can easily become museum material if handled too cleanly. This collection seems valuable because it lets a reader feel Japanese modernism as something still kinetic, strange, urban, and unfinished.

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.