Synopses & Reviews
These poems developed via e-mails exchanged between Tess Gallagher and Lawrence Matsuda over a number of years. The resulting collaboration is a poetry jam session where they trade and borrow images, and run riffs on each other’s poems in a responsive, competitive, and lighthearted way. At the start of each section they expand on what happens in their exchanges. Early on, Tess characterizes the style as being "kind of hip and comic book and jangly," and also "prickly with antennae." Like any dance it’s also an invitation to lose time and as Larry says—to show your "chops." A kind of dueling banjos.
Review
"Matsuda has the ability to sear your mind and heart with startling images and emotions that stay with you for days.…" Peg Cheng
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"[Lawrence Matsuda’s] singular poetic voice is sensual and searing, fierce and funny." John G. Hill
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"[Tess Gallagher’s] poems fly very low, hug the earth, walk or idle at a pace which allows us to see lights, empty lots, buildings, people behind the windows; they allow us to look inside the things and the houses, inside the faces and the bodies, and go through lives long gone, who appear in dreams or in the objects of the memory, kept in basements or on top of wardrobes. They are salvaged from oblivion and live together with beings who are not there anymore." Eli Tolaretxipi
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"In Gallagher’s deft hands, it is plain to see that comedy and tragedy are two sides of the same coin." Entertainment Weekly
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"It is impossible to read Tess Gallagher’s poems without being drawn into their mesmerizing rhythms and convinced of the rightness of her intense yet unforced images." Joyce Carol Oates
About the Author
Tess Gallagher’s latest book, Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf), was published 27 September, 2011. Graywolf also published Dear Ghosts and Moon Crossing Bridge, as well as other works, including her selected stories, The Man from Kinvara. Her essay collections, A Concert Of Tenses and Soul Barnacles, are also available from University of Michigan Press. She recently companioned the film BIRDMAN, which includes one of the short stories of her late husband, Raymond Carver: "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love." She became an encourager of its director, Alejandro Inarritu, throughout work on the film, and their friendship led to his mentioning her as he received four Oscars for the film in 2015. This friendship continues through Inarritu’s work on The Revenant, during which Tess sent him poems he said he read to energize himself at breaks in the arduous filming process. She lives and writes in Port Angeles, Washington, her birthplace, as well as intervals spent in her cottage in the west of Ireland, where all of the poems included here were written in her chair that overlooks Lough Arrow and Jimmy Frazer’s green field in County Sligo.
Lawrence Matsuda was born in the Minidoka, Idaho, World War II Relocation Center, a concentration camp. He was among the approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans who were held without due process, some for three or more years. Matsuda has a Ph.D. in education and was a visiting professor at Seattle University. In 2005 he and two colleagues co-edited the book Community and Difference: Teaching, Pluralism and Social Justice, Peter Lang Publishing, New York. It won the 2006 National Association of Multicultural Education Phillip Chinn Book Award. In 2010 Black Lawrence Press published his first book of poetry, A Cold Wind from Idaho. "Minidoka Fences" also appeared in Cerise Press 1:3, Spring 2010.
His second book, Glimpses of a Forever Foreigner, was released in August of 2014. It is a collaboration between Matsuda and artist Roger Shimomura. In 2015 he completed two graphic novels with art work by Matt Sasaki and interviews with Japanese American fighters from the 442nd and their relatives; part one, An American Hero: Shiro Kashino, was released in April 2015 and part two, Fighting for America: Nisei Soldiers, was released in September 2015, published by Wing Luke Museum and Nisei Veterans Committee Foundation