"Not The End of the Broken World": Tianyi on Yuki Tanaka's Chronicle of Drifting
"Written as an extension of his chapbook Séance in Daylight (2018), Chronicle of Drifting enacts a surrealist crossroads, with lexicons spanning the natural, the bodily, the alchemical, and the oracular. The myriad sources of perception belie a mind in flux, embodying a desire to reimagine the mortal veil as more capacious and mutable than it currently seems. In this way, the poems move beyond the ornamentation of songs to the hard work of channeling grief in motion. As Tanaka forges through the uncanny waters of imagination, he reckons with what it means to wander the earth while longing for a less contingent existence."
via LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Eleanor Goodman on Translation
"For Zheng, and for me, the function of poetry, its innate raison d’être, is to mourn. And in mourning, to point a finger. Look! the poet cries, Look! Look at everything that’s been lost, that we are in the process of losing, that we are throwing away out of ignorance and fear and laziness and greed, the habits we’ve formed over a lifetime and cannot loosen our grasp on even if it kills us.” |
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