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4 weeks ago | 
nybooks.com | Catherine Hall |Katie Kitamura |Brandon Shimoda |Rebecca Boyle
Charting an Unheroic Past With her densely textured, ambitious, and deeply collaborative scholarship, the historian Catherine Hall has transformed public discourse about slavery.
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Dec 12, 2024 | 
thebaffler.com | Brandon Shimoda
Three days before Thanksgiving, on November 25, 2019, two Yonsei activists and descendants of incarceration, Linda Sachiko Morris and Lauren Sumida, visited the offices of the Nakamoto Group in Washington, D.C. They were hoping to meet with the CEO, Jennifer Nakamoto—also Yonsei, also a descendant of incarceration—to deliver a petition calling for the termination of her company’s contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
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Dec 11, 2024 | 
lithub.com | Brandon Shimoda
The Author of “The Afterlife Is Letting Go” Remembers James Hatsuaki Wakasa and the Debate Over a Topaz Sculpture’s Removal One evening, many years ago, but not so many years ago, a Japanese man, out for a walk in the American desert, saw a “rare and unusual flower” on the far side of a barbed wire fence, and, leaning closer to look at the flower, was shot in the heart. Article continues after advertisement The Japanese man had lived in the United States for forty years, but was not a...
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Sep 16, 2024 | 
bombmagazine.org | Brandon Shimoda |Rashed Aqrabawi |Ayden LeRoux
Talking with the Dead for Eiko OtakeNo body is going to riseout of that moundof wet dirtIt’s not dirt It’s a bodyI imagined itdryI imaginedmounds everywheremarking the momentsas gravesof where people werenot over there, somewhere elselike trees in pink youthgreet the afterlife+If the people did not transitionfrom life into death,did they die? If they did not die, are they dead? If they are not dead wherewherewhere . . .
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Sep 11, 2024 | 
magazine.interstellarflightpress.com | Conyer Clayton |T.D. Walker |Mary Lee |Brandon Shimoda |Holly Walrath
Reading from the 2024 SFPA Elgin Award NomineesThis is my sixth year reviewing books from the SFPA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association) Elgin Award for best speculative poetry book. A full list of nominated books is available on the SFPA website. This year’s award chair is Felicia Martínez, who I would like to thank for diligently tracking nominations.
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Feb 19, 2024 | 
poetryfoundation.org | Brandon Shimoda
The ball of light that bounced above the concentration camp
held in its patience
the memory of the unusual flower
the Japanese man was reaching for
when he was shot
was born to breathe, to breathe to give life
to breathe to give life to
friendship
blood root apparition
The Japanese man had sensitivity
and must have thought in that desolation
that he had been struck by a heart
in the air before him, around him
a light, tonic mist the feeling of wind
watching over him
Spring
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Sep 25, 2023 | 
poetryfoundation.org | Brandon Shimoda
There is a simpler, more pristine life inside the ball of light bouncing above the barbed wire fence A small incision made in space through which an entirely new fashion of human being is spying on the people incarcerees, we are supposed to call them, that is the signal of their expendability motivating the whirling blades the wave-like crests as the striving of a human to separate the calcified tumor that makes the ball a planet fallen to ice a simpler, more pristine life pressing against...
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Aug 28, 2023 | 
poets.org | Julia Bloch |Brandon Shimoda
Skip to main contentFind and share the perfect poems. Page submenu blockI love what my mother cannot love, gray dust, fruitlike letters. I love your horribles, too, the checkerboard grasses, all my life I wished to be cooked on the steely patio beside weedy rosemary. I saw California, a low red thing, and my fear inside like a piece of yeast. Evenings I drank sour beer on pine slats built smartly to jut from the house throwing anchor long past the edge of anything calendrical.
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Jul 20, 2023 | 
nytimes.com | Anne Boyer |Brandon Shimoda
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/20/magazine/poem-the-desert.htmlBy Brandon ShimodaSelected by Anne BoyerJuly 20, 2023, 5:00 a.m. ET“The Desert,” from Brandon Shimoda’s new collection, “Hydra Medusa,” is emblematic of the complex lyric-historical landscape of borders, dreams, shrines and underworlds found throughout his work.
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Jul 11, 2023 | 
thebaffler.com | Brandon Shimoda |Yang Xiaobin |Séamus Malekafzali |Arielle Isack
I saw the javelina from afar It looked familiar like a neighbor at the edge of the grass, framed by the grass and several barrels of patriotic flowers The javelina’s front leg was wounded It hobbled where it was invited by the shadows to die or await the feral weathervane All mammals grieve, but lack the muscles the tenderness of the inhuman Some people let whichever organism is least apprehensible in its simplicity fall over turn into broth Some people stand where the wounded stood with a...
