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Shima: Poems

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A vivid, expansive vision of intergenerational witness and repair.

The village is tilting on its axis. It is turning. All its organs are spilling into the bay.

shima is a mosaic of the emotional, psychic, and generational toll that exile from a pillaged culture impresses on a poet and his community. Come to haunt Yamagushiku’s practice of ancestor veneration are photographs and a narrative that spans his own life and a mythic parallel filled with a voice as spare as it is present, yearning as it is precise. The poet says, I am taking the sharpest stick and poking the root ancestor. I am insisting that if he awakens I will have something useful to say.

Speaking through a cultural amnesia collected between a sunken past and a sensed, ghostly-dreamed future, shima anchors this interrogation of the relationship between father and son in the fragile connective tissue of memory where the poet’s homeland is an impossible destination.

ISBN-13: 9780771010927

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart

Publication Date: 03-26-2024

Pages: 96

Product Dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.28(d)

Shō Yamagushiku is an independent writer and researcher. He writes from the homelands of the Lekwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples (Victoria, BC). shima is his first poetry collection.

Read an Excerpt

I grasp the lone scraggly hibiscus bush. A man slips inside my body and falls into a single grain of sand. I am looking down at my grassy self in his watering eyes. Above us one bloom opens red to the plateau’s sky. My only flag, a sputtering waterfall, rises un-prospected waving and weighing on me. The man and I wear shame softly and for a moment it emulsifies. I begin to sweat. The man licks my shoulder clean. The sun has reached its apex and I am stiff, difficult as ever, pointing crooked west. I am a compass pulling across the inland sea, over the desert to the smiling city by the coast, greeting the gaping ocean, trawling, sifting for that rock of an island, as if through a searching explosion, it might be mine