Synopses & Reviews
"As if through an echolocation of brilliant and insistent off-rhyme, these poems effect a delicate placement¬ of self into body, body into world, world into word. And at the center of it all is an even more delicate loss. Janine Oshiro's Pier takes its measure in precise instances that ache with intelligence. A truly masterful first book."Cole Swensen
Seeking to identify the self that straddles both spiritual and physical worlds, Janine Oshiro's multidimensional poems are borderlandswild and uncontainedwhere vision and illusion become crucial to survival. Pier is a place of frenzied collision where human industry meets feral ocean, a place of arrivals, departures, and transitions. Within these unique architectures, lyric intensity abounds and our identities discover a common landscape.
From "Habitat":
Here is a paper house to burn.
Here are the stones that address the pond.
Now count down
the rings at the top of the temple.
The invasive frogs are said to die upon
leaving their original habitat.
A pleading look in the eyes, sun-
shined, eclipsed by
a pupil. I want outside.
In the wrist is a bone like a boat.
I have been a long time out of water.
Janine Oshiro holds degrees from Whitworth College (now Whitworth University), Portland State University, and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is a Kundiman fellow and the recipient of a poetry fellowship from Oregon's Literary Arts. She lives in Hawaii and teaches at Windward Community College.
Review
"As if through an echolocation of brilliant and insistent off-rhyme, these poems effect a delicate placement¬ of self into body, body into world, world into word. And at the center of it all is an even more delicate loss. Janine Oshiro's Pier takes its measure in precise instances that ache with intelligence. A truly masterful first book."Cole Swensen
"The delicate matter of living inside one's skin pervades Pier, and Oshiro provides a near-handbook on how to slip through the defined boundaries of objects and animals and inhabit them. This animalistic impulse is combined with her penchant for ancestor worship... which in totality provides for a delicious atavism."The Great American Pinup
Who can whisper in the spare dark and still be heard in the greater stillness? Only a poet who bets everything on spirit and the ability of language to outline that spirit. In prose honed to home and verse like stones skipping on the surface of water, who can tell where this wonderfully quiet and haunting book will lead? Not where you would ever think: 'Everywhere is a potential/exit, except the door.' In a virtuosic range of approaches to line, image and poem, Janine Oshiro makes a unique new music.'Kazim Ali
The poems in Pier refuse to privilege poetic craft over intensity of feeling, landscape over interiority, the mundane over the fabular, stoicism over grief. Instead, they have it all--or rather, they emerge from the spaces between contending states: It came out in a childs hand and I was/ not a child. Oshiros is a new voice of antique resonances, born of an anxious apprenticeship to beauty and to pain.”Mark Levine
Synopsis
Called a truly masterful first book by Cole Swenson, Pier is the inaugural winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize.
Synopsis
Seeking to identify the self that straddles both spiritual and physical worlds, Janine Oshiro's multidimensional poems are borderlandswild and uncontainedwhere vision and illusion become crucial to survival. Pier is a place of frenzied collision where human industry meets feral ocean, a place of arrivals, departures, and transitions. Within these unique architectures, lyric intensity abounds and our identities discover a common landscape.
About the Author
Janine Oshiro holds degrees from Whitworth College (now Whitworth University), Portland State University, and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is a Kundiman fellow and the recipient of a poetry fellowship from Oregon's Literary Arts. She lives in Hawaii and teaches at Windward Community College.