Some Girls Walk Into the Country They Are from
In Sawako Nakayasu's first poetry collection in seven years, an unsettling diaspora of "girls" is deployed as poetic form, as reclamation of diminutive pseudo-slur, and as characters that take up residence between the thick border zones of language, culture, and shifting identity. Written in response to Nakayasu's 2017 return to the US, this maximalist collection invites us to reexamine our own complicity in reinforcing literary convention. The book radicalizes notions of "translation" as both process and product, running a kind of linguistic interference that is intimate, feminist, and playfully jagged.
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Sawako Nakayasu is an artist working with language, performance, and translation - separately and in various combinations. She has lived mostly in the US and Japan, briefly in France and China, and translates from Japanese. Her books include Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From (forthcoming, Wave Books), Pink Waves (forthcoming, Omnidawn), The Ants (Les Figues Press), and the translation of The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa (Canarium Books), as well as Mouth: Eats Color - Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-translations, & Originals (reprint forthcoming, Wave Books), a multilingual work of both original and translated poetry. She is co-editor, with Eric Selland, of an anthology of 20th Century Japanese Poetry (forthcoming, New Directions). She teaches at Brown University.
Nakayasu uses words to construct a space, often an intimate one between the writer and reader, the lover and the beloved, friends.
--John Yau, Hyperallergenic
Nakayasu's hypnotic thrust is at times reminiscent of the musical minimalism of composers like Phillip Glass or Steve Reich. Yet she avoids total abstraction just as she avoids hermeticism.
--Laura Wright, American Book Review
Nakayasu writes intentionally on the fence of genres and further blurs the lines among literary forms, something that--regardless of our tendency to categorize and in spite of any genre purists left in our blurry, blurry world--enchants us as readers and excites us craft-wise as writers.
--Michelle Dove, the Small Press Book Review
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