o bon

Brandon Shimoda

November 2011 • 93 pp. • $15.00 • ISBN: 978-1-933959-13-9
Cover art by Manabu Ikeda

• Jerome Rothenberg feature. February 13, 2012.
• PEN.org’s holiday round-up of small press releases. December 15, 2011.
• University of Arizona Poetry Center advance praise. November 2011.
• Small Press Distribution Poetry Best-Seller. November, December 2011.

Brandon Shimoda is underground, in the realm of the dead. One hears “the graceless steps of wandering spirits”—with them he wanders among trees, flowers, water, mixing them with the equally subtle presence of women whose bodies are weightless, who wander in his own life. His world is a hushed world—his book, a silent prayer, not to a god, but to life, the life of survivors—that one can whisper, can join the dead—that whisper turns into a ritualistic text, a celebration of witnessing, of the minute manifestations of reality. Brandon Shimoda barely touches his own words: they come to him from afar, float, take a sigh, haunt us and disappear, reappear on the next page, follow their obscure journey—in that we become bound to hear them, we follow them—they make a poem we want to read, and reread with closed eyes. Insinuating itself in the memory of Hiroshima and the bomb— a disaster surpassing disasters—his work is the saying of the dead who return, is a Requiem.

— Etel Adnan

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