Megan Kamalei Kakimoto

From major new storytelling talent Megan Kamalei Kakimoto, a blazing, bodily, raucous journey through contemporary Hawaiian identity and womanhood. "A knockout. Eleven knockouts, one KO for every story."-Elizabeth McCracken Megan Kamalei Kakimoto's wrenching and sensational debut story collection follows a cast of mixed native Hawaiian and Japanese women through a contemporary landscape thick with inherited wisdom and the ghosts of colonization. This is a Hawai'i where unruly sexuality and generational memory overflow the postcard image of paradise and the boundaries of the real, where the superstitions born of the islands take on the weight of truth. A childhood encounter with a wild pua'a (pig) on the haunted Pali highway portends one young woman's fraught relationship with her pregnant body. An elderly widow begins seeing her deceased lover in a giant flower. A kanaka writer, mid-manuscript, feels her raw pages quaking and knocking in the briefcase. Every Drop Is a Man's Nightmare is both a fierce love letter to Hawaiian identity and mythology, and a searing dispatch from an occupied territory threatening to erupt with violent secrets.

Every Drop is a Man's Nightmare

 —LORRIE MOORE, WHO WILL RUN THE FROG HOSPITAL?

Lindsay

I remember thinking that once there had been a time when women died of brain fevers caught from the prick of their hat pins, and that still, after all this time, it was hard being a girl, lugging around these bodies that were never right—wounds that needed fixing, heads that needed hats, corrections, corrections.

what else is marriage than the infinity of a braided orgasm?

To my knowledge, the bombing does not end. People simply lose interest in talking about it.

I think about how my greatest failure is that I willingly stepped into the role of parent in the first place without bothering to ask myself or anyone else around me the simple question, How do I go on? I’d assumed going on was just a given, rather than a daily battle ending in punctuating headaches, a dry throat, tears seeping down my face like lazy rivers.

I feel the bruises bloom along my neck without witnessing the injury firsthand, which is the best way I can describe being a mother.

Every Drop is a Man's Nightmare quotes

Join the club