Hiromi Yoshida's second poetry chapbook, Epicanthus, offers a lyrical panorama of fortune cookies, TV dinners, Chinese lanterns, and Japanese war brides. Such iconic American commodities and handpicked orientalia coexist with Japanese grandmothers, Taiwanese fathers, and lost-and-found German cousins-unfurling a palimpsest of transpacific Asian American relocations and dislocations, the epicanthus being the arbitrary threshold where the psychodrama of racial identity formation takes place. The hooded eye winks back, a coy invitation to the poet's ingeniously reinvented worlds. At once deeply personal and searingly historical, these new poems provide unforgettable snapshots of Asian American life.
Hiromi Yoshida's second poetry chapbook, Epicanthus, offers a lyrical panorama of fortune cookies, TV dinners, Chinese lanterns, and Japanese war brides. Such iconic American commodities and handpicked orientalia coexist with Japanese grandmothers, Taiwanese fathers, and lost-and-found German cousins-unfurling a palimpsest of transpacific Asian American relocations and dislocations, the epicanthus being the arbitrary threshold where the psychodrama of racial identity formation takes place. The hooded eye winks back, a coy invitation to the poet's ingeniously reinvented worlds. At once deeply personal and searingly historical, these new poems provide unforgettable snapshots of Asian American life.
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