Pink Waves (excerpt)
5it was a wave all alonga passing moment reveals itself to have cued the long apologythe extent that we need another dollarit’s haptic; it’s your membranesliding between the heat of now and surrenderand then somebody holds your wild youwhich parts available for namingatop a sharp manicured naila quiet neck is often mismeasured as discomfort which isindifferent to the noise of the worldthe desk is positioned at the wrong heighte-mails insert pointed arrows to indicate previous utterance in amoment of refrainthe desk is a spacial deadlinereplacing a hipshe was an elegy function; she happened at once; she pitchedso did i lovethese goals are a great carrier of stillness
Feature Date
- October 5, 2022
Series
- Editor's Choice
Selected By
- Heather Green
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“Pink Waves (excerpt)” from PINK WAVES: by Sawako Nakayasu.
Published by Omnidawn Publishing in December 2022.
Copyright © 2022 by Sawako Nakayasu.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Mitsuo Okamoto
Sawako Nakayasu is an artist working with language, performance, and translation–separately and in various combinations. Her newest books include Pink Waves (Omnidawn, forthcoming 2022), Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From (Wave Books, 2020) and the pamphlet, Say Translation Is Art (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020). Translations include The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa (Modern Library, 2020 reprint), as well as Mouth: Eats Color – Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-translations, & Originals (Rogue Factorial, 2011), a multilingual work of both original and translated poetry. An anthology of 20th Century Japanese Poetry, co-edited with Eric Selland, is forthcoming from New Directions. Settle Her, which was written on the #1 bus line in Providence on Thanksgiving Day of 2017, and which commemorates her cutting ties with normative Thanksgiving celebrations, is forthcoming from Solid Objects in 2023. To read more of Sawako Nakayasu’s work, download this free edition of her chapbook, “Say Translation is Art.”
“Pink Waves deepens my immense admiration for Nakayasu’s poems and translations. Expansive, working across genres, she always pushes her writing into new places. In Pink Waves, she has found another way to rigorously clear a space for herself or, perhaps more accurately, her many selves, attaining a fresh perspective. Registering the world crashing into her life, we hear and learn the different languages that flow around her, as well as encounter references to–and echoes of –Adam Pendelton’s collage text Black Dada, Valerie Solanas’s radical feminist SCUM Manifesto, Sol LeWitt’s ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,’ and Ron Silliman’s groundbreaking Ketjak. She uses collage to give a resilient, changing shape to our relentless influx of chaos, and the resulting feelings of anxiety, passion, anger, and love stirred up in us. Turning detritus into sensuous music, Nakayasu’s greatness arises from [undertaking] ‘Experiments in Joy,’ à la Gabrielle Civil, to find a way to live in the here and now.”
— John Yau, author of Genghis Chan on Drums
“Nakayasu’s Pink Waves is an experience of questions becoming artifacts. The speaker asks: ‘how will i locate expansiveness in touch’? By ‘dreamlight’, a reader is trained, by this speaker, in a process of listening that’s both a ‘pledge of silence’ and the recognition that ‘we come to a limit and stop where it fits.’ Is this ‘genre trouble’? Nakayasu has written a book a writer could read, orienting to the desk, to the ‘passing moment,’ in turn. This is grounding. This is beautiful.”
— Bhanu Kapil, author of How To Wash a Heart
"In a deliberate lyricism of regathering, tethering, and receding precedence, in a perpetual canon that keeps spilling and sifting and replenishing what feels like dancing, in a series of breaks weaving wave and snap into writing that listens, Sawako Nakayasu takes the measure of the enjoyment we derive from sensing and making sense of this wasteland of bandwidth and access. Pink Waves is a delicate instrument. Its spare beauty picks up everything."
— Fred Moten, author of The Universal Machine (consent not to be a single being)
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