Epicanthus by Hiromi Yoshida

Hiromi Yoshida’s Epicanthus bobs and weaves through her complicated Japanese and Taiwanese backgrounds—her father’s three marriages; a childhood encounter with a Chinatown pedophile; public hostility toward postwar Japanese brides; and the contradictions of “COVID America.” Like Marilyn Chin’s, her voice is bracing and brazen, open-eyed and cunning, and she brings an impressive arsenal of technique and craft into these poems. But Yoshida is her own complicated original. Even in the most difficult and painful moments, her wit and sense of irony shine through. There’s a quick electric energy in these poems—an expansive vision to which the reader will keep returning.

–David Mura, Author of Turning Japanese: Memoirs of A Sansei and The Last Incantations

 Hiromi Yoshida’s collection of poems Epicanthus calls readers through the senses to avenues of memory—on city streets and in cultural intersections for Japanese American women. Rhythmic, microscopic and unrelenting, Yoshida’s language becomes a vehicle for the body’s mysteries, the unfairness of history and the power of metaphor to reveal.

–Amy Locklin, Author of The Secondary Burial and A Woman Somehow Dead.

 Hiromi Yoshida’s poems in Epicanthus don’t whisper—they roar. It’s no surprise that eyes are both the subject and lens through which we encounter Yoshida’s fearless look at the “sly difference”—the othering of her experience. With a fierce and unflinching eye, Yoshida creates and weaves familial mythologies and legends, together with the heartbeat of the city, while recounting a youth that had been spent navigating fraught public and private spaces where both peril and fleeting tenderness are found. These poems provide an unflinching look at “the wombed woman / suturing the wound within,” and will leave readers unable to blink, while watching “the pearl coalescing / in the grimacing oyster’s mouth.” These poems are haunting songs and survival stories demanding to be read.

–Angelique Zobitz, Author of Love Letters to The Revolution