Common Grace: Poems - The Poetry Shop

Common Grace: Poems

$16.00
Sale price  $16.00 Regular price  $21.00
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Common Grace: Poems - The Poetry Shop

Beacon Press

Common Grace: Poems

$16.00
Sale price  $16.00 Regular price  $21.00
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The first major poetry collection from an award-winning student of Robert Pinsky, exploring the inherited trauma within his Japanese American family, his life as an artist, and his bond with his wife

In 65 lyric poems organized into a triptych, Common Grace offers an important new lens into Asian American life, art, and love.

Part 1, "Soul Sauce," describes the poet's life as a practicing visual artist, taking us from an early encounter with an inkwell at Roseland Elementary in 1969 to his professional outdoor easel perched on Long Island Sound.

Part 2, 'Ubasute," is named after the mythical Japanese practice wherein "a grown son lifts / his aged mother on his back, / delivers her to a mountain, / leaves her to die." This concept frames a wrenching portrayal of his parents' decline and death, reaching back to his father's time in the American internment camps of WWII and his mother's memories of the firebombing of Tokyo. It also anchors the 2 outer parts in the racial trauma and joys passed down from his parents.

Part 3, "Gutter Trees," gives us affecting love poems to his wife and the creative lives they've built together.

Ranging in scope from private moments to the sweep of familial heritage, Caycedo-Kimura's poems are artful, subtle, but never quiet.

Book Details

ISBN:
9780807015889
Binding:
Paperback
Pages:
104
Authors:
Aaron Caycedo-Kimura
Publisher:
Beacon Press
Published Date:
2022-10-04
Language:
English

About Aaron Caycedo-Kimura

A writer, visual artist, and educator, Aaron Caycedo-Kimura holds an MFA in creative writing from Boston University and serves as Visiting Lecturer in English at Trinity College. His poetry examines Japanese American internment and the Tokyo firebombings as sources of inherited trauma. His chapbook Ubasute (Slapering Hol Press, 2021) won the 2020 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition, and his debut collection Common Grace appeared from Beacon Press in 2022. His honors include a MacDowell Stanford Calderwood Fellowship, a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry, and a St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award in Literature.

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