Fukushima Dreams by Andrea Moorhead

One can almost feel the light brushing of an angel’s wing over the pages of Fukushima Dreams. Andrea Moorhead’s elegant approach to this harsh topic highlights her subtle and graceful expertise with language. Fragile as crystal, detailed as a pointillist painting, her insight transports the reader to that place and time where “air displaced creates a ripple along the seam of the day / light shattering pupils and the only way to restore balance / unknown ash is wavering along the horizon / glinting as snow on a sudden night / arms open to the darkness but catching on the branches.” The poet relays the feeling of these events with the empathy of one who had been there, “skin glowing at night / to the sound of dreams scraping the sky bare.”

–Patty Dickson Pieczka

Andrea Moorhead’s poems are inventive and even startling within their tranquil pacing. When we think of Fukushima, we evoke the nuclear disaster, but Fukushima Dreams is not static in that sense. Throughout this book, Moorhead creates a three-dimensional context, one deftly populated by living things where “snow fallen in your hair / creates a nest for the moon and stars.” While the nuclear disaster remains ever-present, we are not bludgeoned by that horrific event; rather, it is echoed with precision throughout these poems: “the blue flowers you gathered yesterday / are still on the table / despite your absence.” Enjoy the eloquent mythology that is Fukushima Dreams.

–Alan Britt, author of Optical Illusions, Towson University