Homage as Provocation: Karen Tei Yamashita’s Sansei and Sensibility
What happens when an author transposes an iconic plot into a new cultural setting? In works as varied as Preti Taneja’s We That Are Young (based on King Lear), Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and...
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On Relic and Recovery: A Conversation with Kimiko Hahn
Kimiko Hahn’s tenth book of poems, Foreign Bodies, is inspired by the Chevalier Jackson Collection at Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum, an assemblage of inhaled and swallowed objects Dr. Jackson extracted...
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Wingtips and Shell-Toes
I grew up the beloved only child of a father who—having moved on up from Sheepshead Bay to the Upper East Side—cared deeply about good clothes. His shelves held stacks of Turnbull & Asser shirts...
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Landscape as Mindscape: A Conversation with Michael Prior
The title of Michael Prior’s first book of poetry, Model Disciple, is apt description for the writer himself: Prior is a disciplined student of the poetic tradition, adept in sonnets, elegies,...
View ArticleBoth Trauma and Sin: Elizabeth Miki Brina’s Speak, Okinawa
I am mixed race, the daughter of a Japanese American woman and a German man. I look more Japanese than I do German, but growing up, I often forgot that my face did not blend in with the white faces of...
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Work Isn’t All Hardship: Talking with Kikuko Tsumura
I’m no stranger to burnout. My day job fills my waking hours with court dates, bureaucracy, secondary trauma, and translating bad news into my second language, such that at night, I can’t even decide...
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