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@brandonshimoda
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We're all the contemplatives of an ongoing apocalypse. —Etel Adnan
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Joined March 2013
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Introducing the contributors to an anthology of poetry on Nikkei / Japanese / Okinawan / American / Canadian incarceration, written by descendants of people who were imprisoned during WWII, edited by
@BrynnSaito
and me, coming out summer 2025
@haymarketbooks
:
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The Harvard Law Review refused to run this piece about genocide in Gaza. The piece was nearing publication when the journal decided against publishing it. You can read the article here:
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"One may wonder why Israel would kidnap a poet. The answer is simple. In its genocidal war against Palestinians, Israel seeks to erase not only Palestinian lives but also their culture and heritage. Targeting a poet is part of this..."
@PalestineCenter
:
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"In Gaza you can witness what the end of the world will look like."
In December, Hudia, a refugee in Rafah, kept a diary of the horrors Israel has been visiting upon Gaza since October.
This is testimonial 18 of our Palestine Uncensored series.
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Early in our friendship, Etel Adnan gave me a list of books to read and when I thanked her for the "recommendations" she said, "These are not recommendations. I would like to share them with you to create a common ground in a world we both like so profoundly, a silent language."
Poets— who were your most important teachers and, in a sentence, why? (DM me pls if you prefer.) Thank you!
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"Their cowardice is legendary."
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from an email Etel Adnan wrote to me on December 26, 2010:
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for *weeks* now, a group of students at stanford have been demonstrating in sit-in against genocide in palestine. w/respect for their action & clarity, & that of students all over, i sent this piece to stanford daily on november 12. finally out 2 days ago
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The 12 questions in Bhanu Kapil's The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers:
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The 卐 administration is considering a piece of "unused federal property" in Arkansas for a detention center for immigrant children. It's 5 minutes from the ruins of Rohwer, the concentration camp where 8,475 Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans were incarcerated 1942-1945.
One big difference between Rohwer and today: The parents kept at Rohwer in World War II weren't separated from their children.
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Two of my heroes are George & Frank Hirahara, the father & son who built a fugitive dark room/photo studio beneath their barracks in the Heart Mountain concentration camp, where they took/developed 2000+ photos in secret. Here's a rendering of their studio, and a photo of George.
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This episode is very close to my heart, and it is the story of many other Gazans, watch the NEW episode of Hakawatya here:
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My daughter asked me tonight, "What do your eyes say to the words when you're reading a book?"
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"It shall pass, I keep hoping. It shall pass, I keep saying. Sometimes I mean it. Sometimes I don't. And as Gaza keeps gasping for life, we struggle for it to pass, we have no choice but to fight back and to tell her stories. For Palestine."
Refaat Alareer, in Light in Gaza
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"We killed somebody because he was walking suspiciously." And for then a year I was haunted by how I walked, because what does it mean to walk suspiciously?
Refaat (
@itranslate123
) here explains israel's "oops, we made a mistake; we killed these 50 people by mistake."
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68 civilians died in Pearl Harbor.
Pearl Harbor was then used to justify the incarceration of 150,000+ people of Japanese ancestry in the Americas, and the murder by atomic bomb of 200,000+ in Japan, most of whom were civilians.
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What are your favorite 𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘸𝘯 works of Asian American literature?
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My grandmother died this morning. June Shimoda, b. Chizuko Yamashita, July 17, 1926. Here's a painting she made a few months ago. It was the last thing she made, and one of the few things she had left in her room:
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Starting next week, I'll be teaching, for the first time, a class on the literature of Japanese American incarceration. The reading list is 100% work by survivors and descendants of the prisons, detention centers, and concentration camps. [Image: from Kiku Hughes's Displacement]:
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For
@GuardianUS
I spoke to Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish about the Israeli strikes on Gaza, how no struggle exists in a vacuum and the role of poetry and writing in times of war
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Christina Sharpe (
@hystericalblkns
)'s copies of Toni Morrison's Beloved and Dionne Brand's A Map to the Door of No Return, which appear in her book Ordinary Notes, forthcoming so soon
@fsgbooks
@DauntBooksPub
:
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People think Biden's genocide is ruining his re-election campaign. Genocide IS his re-election campaign.
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My students have been writing letters to the dead. One of them wrote, in a letter to an ancestor, "I hope you are learning wherever you are... I know I am learning, maybe for all of us."
What a beautiful and affirming understanding of death, and of learning.
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One of my favorite libraries in the world is Shiba Ryōtarō's library, part of the Shiba Ryotaro Memorial Museum, designed by Ando Tadao, in Osaka. Shiba, a novelist, collected 20,000 volumes during his life (1923-1996), which are now preserved on shelves that are 40 feet high.
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Two pictures on the mantel: Baldwin's brother David and Nikki Giovanni:
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There's a grim connection between Oppenheimer and
@smithsonian
cancelling the Asian American Lit Fest: in 1995, Smithsonian was going to exhibit the Enola Gay (which deployed the bomb on Hiroshima) with artifacts from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, including photos of the dead →
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I hope that all of the publications that are tweeting links to Mosab Abu Toha's writings are not only demanding his release, but are also demanding the release of all Palestinian prisoners, an end to Israeli’s genocidal occupation, and therefore to USA's funding of it.
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Did you know (I didn't know) that Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's mother, Hyung Soon Cha, wrote a collection of essays about her life called Naega doogo on jakeun heukjeom (The Little Black Spot I Left Behind)? It was published in Korea in 1997 and has never been translated into English.
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from Ryūichi Tamura's Standing Coffin / Dead Languages: Selected Poems 1946-1984, tr. Christopher Drake:
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The best—the purest—part of my job is having access to a photocopier so that my daughter can make photocopies of her stuffed animals:
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72 years ago, this minute, the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima (8:15 am Japan time), instantly killing ~80,000 people.
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The winner of this year's Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, selected by
@canisialu
, is Palestinian poet
@MosabAbuToha
, who is with his family right now in the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza. His book Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear is
@CityLightsBooks
:
Gazan poet Mosab Abu Toha has won the third annual Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry for his collection on life under brutal siege.
Dive into this “supertonic glossary of sorrows so extreme it bends the brace of language into fortifying, never-naïve, elegy”:
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"Police do not enforce the law and are not accountable to it ... Police handle the law after the fact to justify the way that they decided to restore order. Policing is order maintenance, rather than law enforcement."
@prisonculture
, On the Road With Abolition
@haymarketbooks
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"Knowledge is Israel's worst enemy. Awareness is Israel's most hated and feared foe. That's why Israel bombs a university: it wants to kill openness and determination to refuse living under injustice and racism."
Refaat Alareer, in Light in Gaza
@haymarketbooks
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These are the senators who voted to ban funding for UNRWA, the agency that provides direct aid/services (food, water, healthcare) to Palestinians, as over one million people in Gaza are facing imminent famine. The bill they passed also approves another $3.8 billion to Israel.
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Love to everyone who has never felt at home anywhere except for in mockingly brief flashes of untranslatable feeling.
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Mohammad Malas's documentary, The Dream (filmed in 1981, released in 1987), feat. Palestinians in the Sabra, Shatila, Burj al-Barajneh, and Ain al-Hulweh refugee camps in Lebanon, describing their dreams: .
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"The Poetry Foundation manages about $245,000,000 in total assets, most of which appears to be investment capital ... An allocation of even just 2%, or $5,000,000, could meaningfully support the livelihoods of hundreds of writers and literary workers who need it most."
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One of my favorite moments in film history is this one, from Agnès Varda's Ulysse (1982), in which a goat, invited to respond to a photograph of a goat, eats the photograph. Varda died today (March 29, 2019).
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from an email Etel Adnan wrote to me on December 26, 2010:
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And trees are not just trees; they are the ribs of childhood.
Mahmoud Darwish, Journal of an Ordinary Grief, tr. Ibrahim Muhawi
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I want acts and accounts of care as shared and distributed risk, as mass refusals of the unbearable life, as total rejections of the dead future.
@hystericalblkns
, Ordinary Notes (Spring 2023)
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Love and thanks to Solmaz Sharif, Dionne Brand,
@criveragarza
, and Wong May, for their humbling words about Hydra Medusa, my new book of poetry and prose, coming this summer
@nightboatbooks
:
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New
@DukePress
: Dionne Brand's Nomenclature: New & Collected Poems, incl. a new long poem (in which Brand's diaspora consciousness dismantles our quotidian disasters), 8 volumes of Brand's poetry (1983-2010), with an intro by
@hystericalblkns
:
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Oppenheimer wants us to believe that by forcing us to endure the perspective of a beleaguered white genius we might begin to confront the horrors of nuclear war. But to begin to confront the horrors of nuclear war, we would have to, as Mary McCarthy said, "interview the dead." →
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"Until I got spectacles when I was four I thought trees were green clouds."
—Audre Lorde, in conversation with Adrienne Rich, 1979
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My new book, Hydra Medusa — poetry + prose written in Tucson, 2017-2020 — is alive
@nightboatbooks
: . Love to Nightboat for making the book of my (actual) dreams. To Solmaz, Dionne,
@criveragarza
, Wong May for their support. To Manabu Ikeda for the mantis:
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For anyone who says that protesters "destroyed" downtown
#Tucson
(by breaking some easily repairable windows/writing some beautiful words on some unsightly walls): No. Generations of white-led urban renewal and development (aka exclusion and erasure) destroyed downtown Tucson.
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“Genocidal Machine”: Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah on Israel’s Destruction of Gaza’s Hospitals
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Palestinian poets Samih Al-Qasim, Fadwa Tuqan, and Mahmoud Darwish
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Most people probably wonder why I am still writing about my mother. I want to tell them that it is because my mother is still dead.
@VChangPoet
, Dear Memory (
@Milkweed_Books
)
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"A cousin of mine sent a voice message to us saying that 'This may be my last day. And if it is, I want to die at home.'"
"Homes hold memories... There is a mass murder to memory."
—poet Fady Joudah
Palestinian-American physician Dr. Fady Joudah, who has lost family members in Gaza, tells
@JamesAALongman
he's "holding up, not easily" with the ongoing conflict.
"[I'm] asking to see Palestinians as equal human beings."
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Did anyone else notice that the moon went from half to full in two days?
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absent memory, inherited memory, belated memory, prosthetic memory, mémoire trouée, mémoire des cendres, vicarious witnessing, received history, postmemory
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Today my daughter (1½) pointed at a cigarette butt and said "starfish," pointed at a statue of Saint Augustine and said "Buddha," and pointed at a picture of four penguins standing around a small pond in a zoo and said, "government."
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The exhausted are exhausted because they sell the hours of their lives to survive their lives, then they use the hours they haven't sold to get their lives ready for selling, and the hours after that to do the same for the other lives they love.
Anne Boyer, The Undying
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The Poetry Foundation picked a side.
I want to share that I had a 3,500 word review of Sam Sax's PIG shelved on October 8 by The Poetry Foundation because it discusses anti-zionsim. The decision came from the leadership team of the foundation. I was told Poetry didn't want to be seen as "picking" a side.
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Somalia is the fourth country the US has bombed since the start of 2024, in addition to Yemen, Iraq and Syria.
U.S. Forces Strike Somalia for First Time in 2024, Killing 3
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The makers of Oppenheimer really want us to believe that all of the geniuses who conspired to invent a weapon that could murder entire populations in an instant were slow to realize that they had invented a weapon that could murder entire populations in an instant.
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Palestinian American writer
@randajarrar
was dragged out of a PEN event for protesting its Zionist speaker. Is this what PEN means by "standing at the intersection of literature + human rights to protect free expression" and "ensuring people have freedom to express their views"?
With delusional liberal aplomb,
@PENamerica
claims objectivity while platforming genocidal Zionists and silencing Palestinians like
@randajarrar
, who enact the “free speech” PEN claims to stand for
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Shout out to anyone whose desk is a kitchen table, kitchen counter, bathroom sink, steering wheel, dashboard, coffee table, armrest, radiator, washing machine, trashcan, trashcan lid, lap, leg, shoebox, pillow, window sill, wall.
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Nothing that Barthes or Sontag wrote about photos and their relationship to presence, memory, loss, is as illuminating to me as watching my 2½ year old daughter try to climb into a photo of her with her cousins, and then, realizing she can't, collapsing, distraught, to the floor.
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Please read through this spreadsheet, which currently lists 475 fundraising campaigns for families seeking help and/or evacuation in Gaza. It includes their names, needs, links to their fundraising sites and socials, and what % they've already raised:
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Mohammed El Kurd on the ongoing Nakba, and the present revolution.
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My next book is not going to be as good—or as intelligent or interesting—as my last book, because it is a record of living, therefore of exhaustion and deterioration. But it is for that reason a book that I love and am grateful to be sharing. Hydra Medusa, 2023
@nightboatbooks
.
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the bio accompanying
@rashaabdulhadi
's poems, "Incomplete List of Unauthorized Palestinians" and "a litany of refusals to become ghostly"
@theoffingmag
:
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Listening for Something... Adrienne Rich and Dionne Brand in conversation: a film by Dionne Brand (1996)
@thenfb
:
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Speaking as one of them, I hope that all descendants of the dehumanization, dispossession, forced removal, and mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII speak out against the present and ongoing genocide of Palestinians and in support of their liberation.
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One of the books I'm most looking forward to,
@hystericalblkns
's Ordinary Notes—a series of 248 notes constructing an immersive portrait of everyday Black existence, at the heart of which is the indelible presence of Sharpe's mother—is coming Spring 2023:
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There's a beer company in Dallas, run by three white people, called Manhattan Project, after the effort that produced the atomic bomb. Their beers have "cool" names like Black Rain and Necessary Evil, one of the planes involved in the bombing of Hiroshima:
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Mohammad Malas's documentary, The Dream (filmed in 1981, released in 1987), feat. Palestinians in the Sabra, Shatila, Burj al-Barajneh, and Ain al-Hulweh refugee camps in Lebanon, describing their dreams: .
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If poetry does not carry a lantern from house to house,
if the poor do not know what it 'means'
we had better discard it!
It is better that we seek immortal silence.
Mahmoud Darwish, Of Poetry (1964), tr. John Mikhail Asfour
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a postcard that came with my copy of Saretta Morgan's Alt-Nature:
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It is not poetry's job to wipe away tears. / Poetry should dig a trench where they can overflow and drown the universe.
—Zakaria Mohammed, from A Date for the Crow, translated from the Arabic by
@LKTuffaha
@thebafflermag
:
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Etel Adnan's The Arab Apocalypse (PDF: )
Re-re-re-reading the Arab Apocalypse & tbh I've never felt as close to this text as right now. She was really writing to us from inside a black hole, to a future where we will be re-inserted into a different flavor of black hole. Sometimes illegibility can be so clarifying.
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Poetry is the unshakable ally of the victim, and it can only find a ground of understanding with history on the basis of this fundamental principle.
Mahmoud Darwish, in conversation with Subhi Hadidi and Basheer al-Baker, 1993, tr. Amira El-Zein and Carolyn Forché
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Oppenheimer/Smithsonian represent power/control. They're only able to see communities of color through that perspective, i.e. on their terms or not at all. If communities of color — if the casualties of that perspective — speak out, the result is cancellation: silencing, erasure.
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Dear
@GraywolfPress
,
Are you going to reprint Fadwa Tuqan's A Mountainous Journey, her memoir, from becoming a poet to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank in 1967, trans. by Olive Kenny, w/poems trans. by Naomi Shihab Nye, which you used to publish but has gone out of print?
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