Killing Kanoko: Selected Poems of Hiromi Itō (original) (raw)

2009

Abstract

Hiromi Ito, born in 1955 in Tokyo, is one of the most important and dynamic poets of contemporary Japanese literature. After her sensational debut in the late 1970s, she emerged as the foremost voice of the wave of women's poetry that swept Japan in the 1980s. To date, she has published more than a dozen collections of poetry, several novels, and numerous books of essays. "KILLING KANOKO is a powerful, long-overdue collection (in fine translation) of poetry from the radical Japanese feminist poet, Hiromi Itō. Her poems reverberate with sexual candor, the exigencies and delights of the paradoxically restless/rooted female body, and the visceral imagery of childbirth leap off the page as performative modal structures--fierce, witty, and vibrant. Hiromi is a true sister of the Beats." --Anne Waldman "The appearance of this generous and beautifully rendered translation of Hiromi Itō's poetry is a significant and memorable event for American letters. For Itō is poet of truly international stature, whose work breaks down barriers of language and gender, bringing an unprecedented erotic energy and eruptions of transgressive and domestic excess into areas of deep myth and shamanistic performance. It is a poetry of her world and of our worlds as well, the gift of a supremely intelligent and relentlessly exuberant mind, situated somewhere between bliss and nightmare. That she has now chosen to live among us is a still further cause for celebration." --Jerome Rothenberg

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