The Asian American Literary Review
The Asian American Literary Review is a space for writers who consider the designation “Asian American” a fruitful starting point for artistic vision and community. In showcasing the work of established and emerging writers, the journal aims to incubate dialogues and, just as importantly, open those dialogues to regional, national, and international audiences of all constituencies. It selects work that is, as Marianne Moore once put it, “an expression of our needs…[and] feeling, modified by the writer’s moral and technical insights.”
Published biannually, AALR features fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, comic art, interviews, and book reviews. Discover Nikkei will feature selected stories from their issues.
Visit their website for more information and to subscribe to the publication: www.asianamericanliteraryreview.org
Stories from this series
Poems by Hiromi Itō -- from Wild Grass on the Riverbank - Part 2
Aug. 12, 2012 • Hiromi Itō
Read Jeffrey Angles’ short essay about Wild Grass on the Riverbank >> Mother Leads Us to the Wasteland Where We Settle Down Mother led us along and we got on boardWe got on and off againBoarding cars and busses and planesThen more buses and trains and cars I was beginning to think that life would go on forever, it would go on forever, but one day it stopped all of the sudden, that day wasn’t especially different from all the others …
Poems by Hiromi Itō -- from Wild Grass on the Riverbank - Part 1
Aug. 5, 2012 • Hiromi Itō
Read Jeffrey Angles’ short essay about Wild Grass on the Riverbank >> Mother Leads Us on Board Mother led us along And we got on board We got on, got off, then on againWe boarded cars and bussesWe boarded planes Then more buses and trains and cars The place where we arrived was a building full of muffled voices, it had a cold corridor where people had gathered in droves, they were all looking confused, they were all looking confused as they didn’t …
Hiromi Itō - from Wild Grass on the Riverbank
July 29, 2012 • Jeffrey Angles
Born in Tokyo in 1955, Itō Hiromi is one of the most important women poets of contemporary Japan. Itō rose to prominence in the 1980s with a series of dramatic collections of poetry that described sexuality, pregnancy, and feminine erotic desire in dramatically direct language. Her willingness to deal with touchy subjects such as post-partum depression, infanticide, and queer sexual desire took Japan—a nation more used to images of women as proud wives, mothers, and quiet caregivers—by surprise and earned …
Poems by Amy Uyematsu
July 22, 2012 • Amy Uyematsu
Orchid Season in Mr. Ikeda’s Garden : The “Welcome” sign still hangs abovehis garden gate though koi no longer swimin the emptied pondand hummingbirdsdo not return at spring some say the beesare disappearing too but Mr. Ikeda’s orchidscan still fill a greenhouse : White with its bold yellow throat The palest pink with violet veins Jungle green freckled withginger and maroon What could be better than choosingthe most gorgeous Or be lost in so much luxurious profusion : In Japanese legend, life’s bountyfor a …
Asian American Literature Forum Response by Anna Kazumi Stahl - Part 3
July 15, 2012 • Anna K. Stahl
Read part 2 >> Now, to return to the issue posed in this forum’s prompt: in my case, I must try to find an instance in which both a generational difference and a national-cultural one revealed their criteria and influence. And there was a specific instance, an event I participated in several years ago, in 2004, for the “Japan Theme Day” at the Buenos Aires International Book Fair. I was invited together with an Argentine Nisei, Maximiliano Matayoshi, a talented young …
Asian American Literature Forum Response by Anna Kazumi Stahl - Part 2
July 8, 2012 • Anna K. Stahl
Read part 1 >> To get back to the prompt this forum is based on, I answer that I do see a parallelism between those expansions in an Asian American literature’s aesthetic/stylistic reach and that 1980s Presidential apology to Japanese Americans (although those $20,000 checks remain a bit of a thorn, and most pooled the money for monuments and programs that would keep the memory of those ten internment camps alive for future generations). Those were the kinds of things that …
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