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A vivid, expansive vision of intergenerational witness and repair.
The village is tilting on its axis. It is turning. All its organs are spilling into the bay.
Shima is a mosaic of the emotional, psychic, and generational toll that exile from a pillaged culture impresses on a poet and his community. Come to haunt yamagushiku's practice of ancestor veneration are photographs and a narrative that spans his own life and a mythic parallel filled with a voice as spare as it is present, yearning as it is precise. The poet says, I am taking the sharpest stick and poking the root ancestor. I am insisting that if he awakens I will have something useful to say.
Speaking through a cultural amnesia collected between a sunken past and a sensed, ghostly-dreamed future, shima anchors this interrogation of the relationship between father and son in the fragile connective tissue of memory where the poet's homeland is an impossible destination.
shō yamagushiku writes from the homelands of the Lekwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples (Victoria, BC). His first poetry collection, shima, reflects ancestors, violence, and tradition.
“Within the slip-leak-sputter of shō yamagushiku’s shima a familiar vocabulary for life, spirit, and searching ripples away from the page, ‘reborn as a sick fish with strange fins.’ Each scale sheens with mirror-worlds that break when asked, ‘Aren’t you tired?’ To swim with this bioluminescence is to learn to sit with failure, of inherited habits of violence that no known ritual can shake, except the half-dreamed one a poet chances upon in silence, in letting go. shima is a ‘clearing full of presence’ for the music of one’s body, memory, and history. The most skeptical and faithless part of me turned with awe.”
-Jane Shi
“What do you call the act of witnessing, in real time, the movement of a person in the process of liberating themselves from the ruins and the roots of the past by transforming, or being transformed, into the embodiment of an entirely new, self-flourishing ecosystem? Testifying? Empowering? Dis-empiring? Reading? I don’t know that I read shō yamagushiku’s shima so much as I become sensitized to and botanized by its forms of resistance and hard-won revelations. I cannot explain or express, really, what this work means to me. It is meaning, a reintegration of the future, and, in poetry, my chosen family.”
-Brandon Shimoda
