Praise for Names and Rivers
"Shuri Kido is well-known in his native Japan, and his work at last comes to the United States in this lovely bilingual selection, translated by Tomoyuki Endo and Pulitzer Prize winner Forrest Gander. Kido’s poems are frequently spiritual dramas set in a dreamlike landscape of symbols, in which a central, isolated figure encounters mysterious phenomena while making ambiguous progress toward an inscrutable goal. 'Elusive water,' he writes in 'Some Thoughts on Kozukata.' 'You draw it up, / pour it over yourself. / Today courses by like yesterday, / today floats like a cork on tomorrow. / And that’s why you draw water.'”—Troy Joillimore, Washington Post "The Five Best Poetry Collections of 2022”
"The expansive, philosophical poems in Names and Rivers: Selected Poems by Shuri Kido consider themes of solitude, time, and ‘naming’ through close attention—fueled by both scientific knowledge and awe—to geological forms and rivers. According to co-translator and scholar Tomoyuki Endo’s substantial introduction, Kido, an eminent writer known as Japan’s ‘far north poet,’ draws on his ‘geographical imagination’ to engage with ‘time as an encompassing palimpsest.’”—Heather Green, Harriet Books, Poetry Foundation
"Kido’s first foray—and a rewarding one—into English translation."—Metropolis
“Tomoyuki Endo and Forrest Gander dizzyingly transpose Shuri Kido’s exploration of synchronous time and realization through an array of carefully selected and presented poems. Beginning with a delightful essay on Kido’s conception of time as ‘an encompassing palimpsest’ by Tomoyuki Endo, Names and Rivers urges the reader to detach from a linear view of time and to open their eyes to the smudged writing in the margins. . . . Names and Rivers is an intense, looming permutation of Shuri Kido’s poetry. It is a hand drawn halfway from the river as two currents crash back into one. It is a call to see everything as everything, to ‘take to our feet, to get going,’ and to continue crossing the river.”—Action Books Micro-Reviews
"The collection spans 18 of Kido's works, from his 1985 debut anthology Shokan (Summoning) to 2010's Maboroshi no haha (Mother of Illusions) and Sekai-kai (World-Ocean). The original Japanese sits alongside translations of Kido's representative poems including "Hitetsu" ("Non-ferrous"), "Kozukata," and "Sen no boin" ("A Thousand Vowels"), making it of interest to native Japanese speakers as well. . . . The collection manages to get across [Kido's] original style of writing."—Mainichi
Reviews
of Forrest Gander’s poetry translations:
“[Spectacle & Pigsty] is a superb anthology of
Kiwao Nomura and it is the best possible translation one could hope for. There
has never been poetry in Japanese that exhibited such affinities in the English
language. This is a proof that his poetry is open to the wide world.”—Judge’s
citation, Best Translated Book Award
“From the very first lines of Alfonso D’Aquino’s fungus
skull eye wing, Forrest Gander’s translation feels utterly exacting in its
choices.”—American Poetry Review
“Alice
Iris Red Horse convinced me that multiple-translator anthologies can be
done better. It even convinced me that it could be a new model for poetry
publication.” —Hyperallergic
“The poet’s
process, the end notes that place each poem in context, the photos of his
handwritten manuscript pages, this peek behind the curtain of his daily life,
are all of the utmost interest and significance to scholar and general reader
alike.” —Eclectica
“Alfonso D’Aquino is one such poet of sensation and science.
Fungus skull eye wing, his first collection available in English, is
dense with the tropical life of Cuernavaca: root systems, veins of mineral,
tangles of foliage….Forrest Gander’s translation is another marvel.”—The
Paris Review
“Forrest Gander has redefined our sense of contemporary
Mexican poetry with his wide-ranging selection from Coral Bracho’s compelling
body of work. At once ferocious and veracious, sensual and surreal, immersed in
nature and conscious of imposing a pastoral artifice, Bracho’s writing plays
out a string of discontinuous images knotted with neologisms. Gander shrewdly
adopts a modernist approach, all clarity and explicitness, mimicking her
mannerisms yet inscribing his own suggestive nuances. His versions admit us
into her fantastic world by evoking a succession of U.S. poetries—Whitman,
Black Mountain, the New York School—and thereby casting them in a new light
that is strangely beautiful.”— PEN Translation Award Citation (finalist)
