Animate, inanimate aims

Brenda Iijima

2007 • 96 pp. • $15.00 • ISBN: 978-1-933959-02-3
Cover art, drawings and collages by Brenda Iijima

• Galatea Resurrection review by Bloomberg-Rissman. Dec 2008.
• Jacket Magazine review by Thomas Fink. Autumn 2008.
• Midwest Book Review by Susan Bethany. Nov 2007.
• Every Other Day review. Sept 2007.
• Cross-Cultural Poetics interview with Leonard Schwartz. Sept 2007.

This book is supported by the FACE OUT Jerome Foundation Regrant administered by the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses.

Drawing the Animate, Inanimate Aims together, they settle into difference. With subtle contagion of body as structured text, titled ligatures in the midst, thick with emotional matériel, Brenda Iijima’s work rhymes—off or near—sight as sound. Nature for culture, culture as nature, “we/ can play school under a tree” or at war. Breaking and building in twitchy compression, the way Marie Menken’s hand-held camera swings, framed and fabulous, this exuberant tragic book of drawings and poems will hook you.

— Norma Cole

A kind of necessity is created here for saying, rejuvenating myths, turning anger into jouissance, making of thoughts a river of light...Beware: we won't be chagrined anymore; such subversion is the changing of the world.

—Etel Adnan

The publication of this book is made possible, in part, by support from: