Ichiban by Patricia Aya Williams

Ichiban

$19.99
$19.99
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Ichiban by Patricia Aya Williams
  • Ichiban by Patricia Aya Williams
Ichiban

Concrete Wolf Press

Ichiban

by Patricia Aya Williams

$19.99
$19.99
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Author note

Ichiban, my first full-length collection, has had many lives over the past four and a half years. It started as a chapbook with a different title, became several other versions of chapbooks with different titles, at some point became a longer collection. I was always drawn to write about my parents and experiences growing up as the only child of a Japanese-born mother and Midwestern father, but I discovered during the revision process that the focus of the book had changed. It started out mostly about my mother, but at some point, “Patsy/Patricia” started to emerge as the pivotal character. I think Ichiban really became what it is when I jumped off the cliff and decided to include experiences from my adolescence, which originally weren’t in the book. I didn’t want to go to some of the places those poems went. But I’m glad I did, because that darkness was necessary. It made the collection stronger.

— Patricia Aya Williams

Read more from Patricia Aya Williams on our blog

Winner of the 2025 Concrete Wolf Louis Poetry Book Award selected by Donna Hilbert.

 

Ichiban is an unsparing and unsentimental coming of age poetry--coming to terms with parents, coming to terms with cultural expectations, and with one's self. I am particularly taken by the variety of angles and poetic forms through which Williams views and recounts salient life-shaping episodes. The title poem "Ichiban" could stand alone-illustrated and animated. The entire collection is a gem. 

-Donna Hilbert, Louis Award judge and author of Enormous Blue Umbrella

 

Patricia Aya Williams' Ichiban follows a Japanese mother, an American father, and their daughter from post-WWII Japan to the Gen-X schoolyards of East San Jose. The collection exuberantly insists that "we too / sing America" applies to teenage girls whose tampons charge like a "battering ram in a moat of blood" and to a tough mother who loves watching sumo and rooting for "wrestlers from her prefecture-Ishikawa" and harshly judging them: "Aww he too little / he not gonna make it." After the father's early death, the speaker revisits photos of him on aircraft carriers, and the mother, as she nears her own death many decades later, asks him: "Pat, my handsome young sailor / ichiban yasashii na kao, most gentle face // God ever show me on this earth- // how you will recognize / my prune face, more than twice your age?" As if anyone could forget her, especially after Ichiban captures her voice, humor, and tenacity with such vibrancy.

-Allison Pitinii Davis, Line Study of a Motel Clerk and Business: a novella
Book Details
Publisher:
Concrete Wolf Press
ISBN:
9781970256130
Binding:
Paperback
Pages:
110
Authors:
Patricia Aya Williams
Published Date:
2026-05-15
Language:
English
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All Poetry Asian Japanese Women Authors

About Patricia Aya Williams

Patricia Aya Williams won the 2025 Concrete Wolf Louis Poetry Book Award, selected by Donna Hilbert. Her debut full-length collection, Ichiban (Concrete Wolf Press, 2026), follows a Japanese-born mother, an American father, and their daughter from post-war Japan to the schoolyards of East San Jose. Williams grew up in San Jose. She holds a BA in humanities with a minor in Japanese and a master's in library and information science, both from San José State University. She worked as a flight attendant before becoming a public librarian. Her chapbooks are Failure Goddess (dancing girl press, 2026) and Haiku for Parents (Origami Poems Project, 2020). She lives in San Diego.

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