Sawako Nakayasu is a poet whose work interrogates the nature of reality and its perception. Her writing explores the boundaries of language and poetry, often employing experimental techniques and unconventional structures. Nakayasu's poetry draws readers into profound considerations of reality, perception, and how we share our experiences. Her distinctive style and approach to crafting verse mark her as a significant voice in contemporary poetry.
SAY TRANSLATION IS ART is a treatise on literary translation that exceeds the bounds of conventional definitions of such, advocating for a wider embrace of translation as both action and as art. In the ever-expansive margins of dominant literary culture, translation links up with performance, repetition, failure, process, collaboration, feminism, polyphony, conversation, deviance, punk, and improvisation.
Ann Lauterbach's experimental and compelling choice for the 2003 Verse Prize merges dramatic forms and poetry with dazzling results.
A poem in conversation with literature and written during a durational performance. Written in loose sonata form, Pink Waves is a poem of radiant elegy and quiet protest. Moving through the shifting surfaces of inarticulable loss, and along the edges of darkness and sadness, Pink Waves was completed in the presence of audience members over the course of a three-day durational performance. Sawako Nakayasu accrues lines written in conversation with Waveform by Amber DiPietro and Denise Leto, and micro-translations of syntax in the Black Dada Reader by Adam Pendleton, itself drawn from Ron Silliman’s Ketjak. Pink Waves holds an amalgamation of texts, constructing a shimmering haunting of tenderness, hunger, and detritus.
Audacious and highly innovative collection that cunningly engages with the assumptions and boundaries around translation, identity, and gender.