The New and Selected Yuri Writing From Peeling till Now

About the Book

What People Are Saying About Yuri Kageyama

“Through the anguished eyes of a mongrel soul, Yuri Kageyama sees the boundless universe in everyday life.”
--Shuntaro Tanikawa, author of Two Billion Light-Years of Solitude and Naked.

“Yuri - behind that prim Japanese face lurks a sultry demoness of words.”
--Geraldine Kudaka, author of Numerous Avalanches at the Point of Intersection.

“Her poetry is a spiritual song that echoes across the borders of cultures, race and gender.”
--Yoshiaki Tago, director of “Talking TAIKO,” “Worst Contact,” and “Maid in Akihabara.”

“Yuri Kageyama is a shrewd denizen of the water-world, savage caricaturist, a ghostly wraith, perpetual exile and huge-passioned troublemaker.”
--Richard Oyama, author of The Country They Know.

“Her gaze is honest, direct and outspoken.”
--Donald Richie, author of The Films of Akira Kurosawa, in a review of Peeling in The Japan Times.

“Yuri Kageyama sings of love, jazz and everyday life.”
--Milton Murayama, author of All I Asking For Is My Body.

“These poems convey an intelligent, sensitive and sexual woman who enjoys life to the full, and who can express herself in a language filled to excess with energy.”
--The Mainichi Daily News review of Peeling.


POETRY AS STIMULATING AS A STUN GUN

THE NEW YURI AND SELECTED YURI: Writing From Peeling Till Now, by Yuri Kageyama. Ishmael Reed Publishing Company, 2011, 134 pp., $19.99 (paper)

In the babbling cosmos of contemporary literature, there have been a handful of distinguished cross-cultural writers who have made the English language their own. One thinks instinctively of Vladimir Nabokov, the Russian who maneuvered words with the elan of a chess master.

More proximate in time and place is the Tokyo-based Dutch writer, Hans Brinckman, a nonfiction author, who also happens to be a poet. Yuri Kageyama, a Japanese woman with an American background, appears to be perfectly at home with both cultures, but chooses to compose her poetry exclusively in English.

Like the manifesto loving European poets of the 1920s and 1930s, Kageyama’s intentions are concisely stated. In her Introduction she writes, “Racial stereotypes and sexuality have always been my obsessions.” These are themes fully explored in the pages that follow.

Kageyama’s images, scoured, purged of ornamentation, can have the effect of a stun gun. In one poem she writes:



SuperMom endures, her womb red and
heavy and big and open, wrenching out
babies and seaweed and stench.
SuperMom spurts out curdled milk like a
fountain in the desert.

In “For women only,” a poem about gender segregated carriages on the Tokyo subway, she infers that the issue of females being sexually harassed is grudgingly acknowledged, but shunted to the rear by more pressing concerns:

farthest from the ticket gates
the first car up front,
and the most dangerous
if we crash

After several dire warnings and premonitions about men and matrimony in the poems and short stories of this anthology, “After the storm” hints at the possibility of a mundane but precious happiness. The sexual fantasies and power infatuations of Western men are exposed in unsparing detail in “Little YELLOW Slut.”

A similar, worse-case treatment of male attitudes toward Asian women is dealt out in a later work, “an ode to the Caucasian male.”

The subject of casual duplicity is touched on in “Disco Chinatown,” when the author writes of male entitlement, of a man establishing proprietorial rights:

You tell me not to dance with anyone else
When I just met you tonight
And isn’t your old lady waiting at your
apartment?

Unlike the writer Anais Nin, whose discreet affairs and eroti

About the Author

Tennessee Reed is the author of six poetry collections, most recently New and Selected Poems 1982-2011, (World Parade Books, 2011), and a memoir Spell Albuquerque Memoirs of a “Difficult Student” (Counterpunch and AK Press, 2009). Adventures Among the X Challenged is her first published novel. Ms. Reed has read her work throughout the continental United States, Alaska, Hawaii, England, the Netherlands, Germany, Israel, Palestine and Japan. She has received her B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley and her M.F.A from Mills College. Ms. Reed is the managing editor of Konch Magazine and the secretary of PEN Oakland