Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Utterly absorbing. The somewhat annoying voice of Nao Yasutani--an ethnic Japanese teenager raised in California and returned to Japan after her father lost his job in the dot.com crash--took a little time to get used to but her horrific experience of bullying at school and her pure love for her great-grandmother Jiko, an anarchist-feminist writer turned Zen nun, soon render her more sympathetic. In contrast, the other narrative about Ruth, closely based on the author, is probing, stubborn, and tender in depicting her dislocation from New York City to a tiny island (Land of the Dead) off the coast of British Columbia and her loss of her mother first to Alzheimer's and then to death. The myriad ways in which the two stories interact to become one tale cast a brilliant light and a wonderful play of shadows on the gift of storytelling.  The invention of Haruki #1, the reluctant kamikaze pilot, shows the noble ideals that the author holds dear.

As it self-identifies, Pulse is not a whodunnit, but a whydunnit. A young man kills himself, and his mother's ex-lover, a woman who migrated with her own parents to Toronto, Canada, may be the only one to understand why he does so. Natalie, an acupuncturist, shares with the dead Saleem an interest in kinbaku, the erotic art of Japanese rope bondage. She is only willing to do the tying, whereas Saleem relishes the pain-pleasure of being tied. Both long, however, to transcend their bodies, the sites of their trauma, while knowing that the body is the only means to such transcendence. The body is also the limit of our knowledge of one another. We have to interpret, after all, one another by means of visual and verbal cues. Chris Lee, a Canadian critic quoted on the back cover, puts it well: " Pulse relentless explores the limits of knowability--cultural boundaries of knowledge, the seemingly impassable divide between one person and another, and the temporal gaps that render m...

When I roomed with Neil Aiken at the Kundiman poetry retreat in 2005, I recognized in him another migratory spirit. Neil was born in Vancouver, but grew up in Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, and various parts of western Canada and the United States. When we met, he was doing his creative writing MFA at the University of California, Riverside, and two years later his first book won the 2007 Philip Levine prize. A road runs through The Lost Country of Sight . A road that observes intently the country it enters, and leaves, and then re-enters. Individually keen, the observations do not, however, describe external realities so much as internal states. The poetry is essentially introspective. This is its strength, but also its danger. It risks making one country very much like another. Love, loss, longing--these psychological states are distinctly evoked in poem after poem, whereas Taipei, Hsin Chu, Kaohsiung, Saskatoon, Astoria (in Oregon), Los Angeles, they are really interchangeable in this poet...

Valparaiso Review announces its three nominations for the Best of the Web anthology from Dzanc Books , a non-profit independent publisher.  * Howard from PFFA drew attention to a neat idea: a poet laureate map . Another Canadian first?