Portuguese
Poems
$26.78
- Paperback
100 pages
- Release Date
26 February 2013
Summary
While on the bus to elementary school in a small New England town, Brandon Shimoda–the offspring of a Japanese American father and white mother–was taunted for being “Portuguese.” Shimoda’s latest collection returns the author to a moment he felt challenged to become what he was being called, however falsely, and despite feeling confused, flushed, and afraid. The poems themselves began to form in adulthood while Shimoda–again riding the bus–took in his fellow passengers: their voices, minds, faces, and bodies; their exuberances and infirmities, the ways they both enlivened and darkened the days. It was within these people that poetry seemed most alive. At the same time, the poems in Portuguese are a response to the words of visual artists whom Shimoda was reading while riding the bus–Etel Adnan, Eugene Delacroix, Alberto Giacometti, Paul Klee, and Joan Mitchell, all of whom appear in the book. It was within these people, too, that poetry seemed most alive. The presiding struggle in this collection is with poetry itself–the form and its impulses, and the act of writing. But Portuguese is more than all these things.It was–and is–an act of preservation, giving form to the energy that makes up some part of our memory.
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781935639510 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 193563951X |
| Author: | Brandon Shimoda |
| Publisher: | Tin House Books |
| Imprint: | Tin House Books |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Number of Pages: | 100 |
| Release Date: | 26 February 2013 |
| Weight: | 184g |
| Dimensions: | 9mm x 140mm x 216mm |
| Series: | Rick Steves' |
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Critics Review
“Portuguese is an enthralling testament to a creative mind beset upon on all sides by attempts at calcification and deleterious circumscription…Portuguese earns its grandeur with a grandeur of spirit that is nearly unparalleled in contemporary verse. Shimoda’s lines are by turns gracefully aphoristic and effortlessly metonymic; they transcend their subject–the author himself–by dint of their intelligence, sensitivity, and spiritual awareness…It is not too much to say that Shimoda is writing, somehow, impossibly, the universal autobiography of a nation…Very highly recommended.” –HUFFINGTON POST “[Portuguese] is, indeed, both strange and marvelous.” –FRANZINE “That day, as the sun was hallucinating, a non-Portuguese boy was being born, and all we know is that he’s a poet who brings that sun back to us.” –ETEL ADNAN “Brandon is who I would dream up as a brother if he wasn’t mine already.” –KELLY SHIMODA “Brandon Shimoda seems to be an Ur-being, a totally new creature.” –TOMAZ SALAMUN “Brandon Shimoda is my favorite living lyric.” –MATHIAS SVALINA “Brandon Shimoda is a poet “OF CREATION,” of Heimweh, a “main event,” a restive-decadent bus rider of nostos and algos–is these and also: Portuguese.” –QUINN LATIMER “Brandon Shimoda wants to go to Portugal, where the snow is imaginary and the streets are almost real.” –BHANU KAPIL “In a temporary world” there is only one Brandon Shimoda who can ‘Rationalize poetry by embodying it before me’ and simultaneously ‘Rake the fragments of bone.’” –LAYNIE BROWNE “This poet keeps himself within his own gaze, as the child keeps in vision the man he has yet to become, and the poems he has written emerge with a form of sight that reaches inward as far as it reaches outward, self’s innermost history to this outward moment we call ‘now.’” –DAN BEACHY-QUICK “Looking into the young Brandon Shimoda’s eyes I see in a starless night sky the full moon circling.” –DOT DEVOTA “Unless that’s a bird on his head, he’s stolen my hair–makes you wonder about a lot of things.” –BRENT HENDRICKS “These poems are what a person might think before slipping into grey dream-visions of their own unborn children.” –CYNTHIA ARRIEU-KING “Brandon Shimoda’s poetry is the most perfect peridot stone sparkling with sharp edges in the daylight.” –NOELLE KOCOT “The mysteries of poesis are exacerbated, enlivened, and somehow fevered in Portuguese–and without Brandon aShimoda’s efforts the scope of American poetry itself would be diminished starkly.” –JOSHUA MARIE WILKINSON “Sometimes there is a poet in service to deliver everything you want to taste in the world. Brandon Shimoda is such a poet.” –CACONRAD “Brandon Shimoda has she-she’d a creche of earthly delights vastly libidinal: ravishing, ceremonial word formations, not withstanding the presence of wrath like a raw cake, sponging. BRENDA IIJIMA. Brandon Shimoda: He’s SWAMP.” –BRANDON DOWNING “I smell the peat of old woods; two boys & diesel in shallow cups, two girls & bone in twiggy beds.” –SAMUEL ACE “Brandon’s is the heroic mechanism which will make everyone love each other with greater truth and intensity, because he lays an equal hive, mouth to mouth to mouth.” –FARNOOSH FATHI “WISE AND SASSY, THIS LITTLE BOY! HIS MOUTH!” –EMILY KENDAL FREY “Yes: in Brandon Shimoda’s work poems become further worlds and not vice versa.” –KARENA YOUTZ “Brandon’s restlessness translates into disruptive, migratory syntax that defies identity, its logic.” –DON MEE CHOI “Here he is again, Shimoda, weaving, wiring, rigging the “gentle wrath of home” into all things.” –ANTHONY HAWLEY “Brandon Shimoda did not write this book, he wrestled it from the bad, holy woman standing in the purple vetch.” –ROB SCHLEGEL “UNITED SHIMODA IS UNITING THE WORLD.” –NATHANIEL TARN “I wish these poems had not been written.” –PHIL CORDELLI
Brandon Shimoda
Brandon Shimoda is the author of three previous books of poetry–O Bon (Litmus Press, 2011), The Girl Without Arms (Black Ocean, 2011), and The Alps (Flim Forum, 2008)–among other solo and collaborative works in print, on cassette, online, and on vinyl. He is currently co-editing, with poet Thom Donovan, a retrospective collection of writings by Lebanese-American poet Etel Adnan (Nightboat Books, forthcoming). He was born in California, and has lived most recently in Maine, Taiwan, and Arizona.
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