Samuels, Lisa & Nakayasu, Sawako (eds.): A Transpacific Poetics

A Transpacific Poetics Edited by Lisa Samuels & Sawako Nakayasu (Litmus Press, paperback)

Publication Date: July 1, 2017

Publisher Marketing: Poetry. Pacific Studies. California Interest. Asian & Asian American Studies. The polylingual works in A TRANSPACIFIC POETICS conceive ocean as consequence, map, identity, visibility, invisibility, and the embodiment of cultural imaginaries layered over by histories of colonization in the globalized present. This collection of poetry, essays, and poetics is committed to transcultural experimental witness in both hemispheres of the Pacific and Oceania. Each piece is a unique intervention that considers the possibilities of meaning in and of the Pacific, the contentious prefix "trans-," and the intersections between place, politics, and language. What is the work of poetics in the midst of language in crisis, under continuous threat of being emptied out of meaning? How do we shape discourses of rights and equality that work against and through destructive fragmentations and fruitful internal differences when we consider "trans" in terms of water, land, borders, the body, and the state?

"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