Sawako Nakayasu

Poetry. Asian American Studies. Is there a relationship between the population density of Tokyo and the pinkest part of a hamburger? Can one touch the inside of a noun to learn the difference between one bicycle and a field of bicycles? How close is yellow to need? How far are human fears from the fears of insects? Through a sequence of prose investigations, directions, theoretical performances, and character sketches, Sawako Nakayasu's TEXTURE NOTES presses itself against everything. Here is a book of liminal cartography, where textures are percolated by thought and propelled by feeling, where intellectual frottage meets sunlight, moonlight, the pain of seeing something beautiful and an entire town enamored by a simple rock. Once again, Nakayasu's writing explodes with genre-bending fury and fine-tuned improvisation, leaving in its wake a largess of feeling for the things of the world.

Texture Notes

Say Translation Is Art

Audacious and highly innovative collection that cunningly engages with the assumptions and boundaries around translation, identity, and gender.

Some Girls Walk Into the Country They Are from

Fiction. Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. THE ANTS is a study not of, but through, ants. In a dashing sequence of prose pieces, Sawako Nakayasu takes the human to the level of the ant, and the ant to the level of the human. Prima facie, THE ANTS is a catalogue of insect observations and observations of insects. But the expose of insect life humbles and disrupts the myopia that is human life, where experience is seen in its most raw and animal form and human "nouveau- ambitious" and "free-thinking" lifestyles become estranged, uncovered, and humbled. Found in the soups of dumplings and remembered in childhood vignettes, these ants trail through what Nayayasu writes as the "industry of survival," exploring interfaces of love, ambition, and strategy. The danger is not in sentiment, but rather, in a gash, a wall, an argument, an intention. Is it more lonely to be crushed into the core of a non- mechanical pencil, to be isolated in the safety of home, or to "find" "it" "all" at the very very last moment? THE ANTS is the distance, the break, the tenuous wilderness between exoskeleton and endoskeleton, and Nakayasu puts her finger on it, and it, and it."

The Ants

Chika Sagawa

Poetry, Translation. Ten poems by Sagawa Chika are conveyed into English and other languages through a variety of translation techniques and procedures, some of them producing multilingual poems. Languages used include English, Japanese, French, Spanish, Chinese.

Mouth: Eats Color -- Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-Translations, & Originals

Poetry. NOTHING FICTIONAL BUT THE ACCURACY OR ARRANGEMENT (SHE catalogs women moving through the world, through mundane activities--tossing out spoiled food, watering plants--that branch out into infinite dimensions of consciousness, memory and sensory experience. The subject herself--simply "she"--is relegated to the title page, allowing the reader to experience her impressions and actions unmediated. From this vantage point, at once disembodied and deeply felt, the poems read with their own resonant clarity, as if viewed through a body of water, the bottom visible but shifting and refracted, shimmering always. "In the world of Sawako Nakayasu...[to] be alive is to be in motion."--Craig Watson. Sawako Nakayasu was born in Yokohama, Japan, and has lived mostly in the United States since the age of six. Other publications include SO WE HAVE BEEN GIVEN TIME OR, (Verse, 2004) and Clutch (Tinfish chapbook, 2004). She edits Factorial, as well as the translation section of the online journal How2.

Nothing Fictional But the Accuracy Or Arrangement (she

Tatsumi Hijikata

Moe Yamamoto

Takashi Morishita

Yelena Gluzman

Drama. Dance. Performance Studies. East Asia Studies. Transcribed by Moe Yamamoto and translated from the Japanese by Sawako Nakayasu. Tatsumi Hijikata (1928-1986) is a founding father of the radical dance form that he called Butoh, whose choreography required dancers to internalize complex and often grotesque images, experiences and perspectives in order to produce precise movements. Though influenced by Western artists and writers the expressionist dance of Mary Wigman, the writings of Artaud, de Sade, Bataille, and Genet, and the drawings and paintings of Goya, Picasso, Toyen, Beardsley, and others he was dedicated to the particular experience of the marginalized, Japanese suffering body after World War II. In the mid-1970s, Hijikata became concerned with developing notation for his Butoh, and some of these Butoh-fu notations remain, largely in the form of notebooks transcribed by his disciples. COSTUME EN FACE is the first publication of one of Hijikata's notebook notations in either English or Japanese. In it we can see, for the first time, the profound interconnectedness of language and body in Hijikata's process of composition."

A Primer of Darkness for Young Boys and Girls

Costume en Face

So we have been given time or

love poems 1994-2004

Hurry home honey

A poem in conversation with literature and written during a durational performance. Written in loose sonata form, Pink Waves is a poem of radiant elegy and quiet protest. Moving through the shifting surfaces of inarticulable loss, and along the edges of darkness and sadness, Pink Waves was completed in the presence of audience members over the course of a three-day durational performance. Sawako Nakayasu accrues lines written in conversation with Waveform by Amber DiPietro and Denise Leto, and micro-translations of syntax in the Black Dada Reader by Adam Pendleton, itself drawn from Ron Silliman's Ketjak. Pink Waves holds an amalgamation of texts, constructing a shimmering haunting of tenderness, hunger, and detritus.

Pink Waves

Poetry. These love poems are unusual for their sense of moving between cultures, their awareness of physical space as articulated by the intersection of human beings, the land, and architectural structures. Love itself is now game, sport, speed-time, dance, performance, now contract, conflict, failure, but always a shifting structure of relation.

Love Poems 1994-2004

Hurry Home Honey

One Factorial

Lisa Samuels

Poetry. Pacific Studies. A TRANSPACIFIC POETICS is a collection of poetry, essays, and poetics committed to transcultural experimental witness in both hemispheres of the Pacific and Oceania. The works in ATPP re-map identity and locale in their modes of argumentation, resituated genres, and textual innovations. "A TRANSPACIFIC POETICS beautifully inscribes what the Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite would call 'tidalectics' by following multiple voice waves across the region and by capturing their registers in an astounding range of genres. A collection of poetry and prose that includes entries such as memory cards, lists and palimpsests, counting journals, scripts, the necropastoral, and critical essays, readers will follow the rhythms of translation and the transcultural, where wavescrashwavescrashwavescrash." --Elizabeth Deloughrey

A Transpacific Poetics

Ann Lauterbach's experimental and compelling choice for the 2003 Verse Prize merges dramatic forms and poetry with dazzling results.

Sawako Nakayasu

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