The Girl Without Arms

by Brandon Shimoda

The Girl Without Arms  is a figure in Japanese folklore—a young girl whose arms are lopped off by her father, and is left to die in the mountains. The father, at the behest of his evil wife—the girl’s stepmother—lures the girl into the mountains at the promise of attending a neighboring festival. This is only the beginning of the tale. 
The poems of Brandon Shimoda’s  The Girl Without Arms  are birthed of the rainy shut-in pause between steps forward and back in a season of great floods. In successive and interlocked sequences, these poems grapple with a seemingly unbridgeable confusion—related to love, the impossibility of life outside of love, and the unbearableness of life within it—as a way to give shape to the dark weather that permeates our lives, so as not to drown at its coming.

Genres: Poetry

87 pages, Paperback

First published February 7, 2011

Reviews

[Joe]

"It is a terrible life when in order to love you must destroy the foundations"
Felt like it was all headed to the this line
caroming toward it, knocking down and absorbing obstacles on the way

"Expressing heavy metals / Disinterred from brideyard silt, dowsing brideful milk"

or

"The stanza tosses over phantom trees / Goose tongues hollying out like cloched fruit"

I can't say enough about the last poem ("What happened to you back there"). It stunned me.

And the whole thing as strange and angular as the syntax and images are (even reminded of R Lowell in some places) is studded with things of resonance-- images which seemed stolen from the atmosphere of my childhood

"Houses being put together Juvenile pokeweed though / No smoke in the chimney"

Not that things to recognize make anything good--but that there is a real landscape here being utterly saturated with the "heavy metals" of_______________________.

[hh · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Casey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes his poems seem AI generated. It’s giving uncanny valley.

[Edward Rathke · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a pretty perplexing read at times. It's kind of fragmented and stitched together. Sometimes it feels like the poem you're reading is the Frankenstein monster of several other poems, but somehow this works.

Or it works in a way. It's highly lyrical and visual and chaotic. It's hard to really capture what's being done on these pages without just putting it in front of you, but I dig it in a way that's hard to explain.

Maybe I won't like it tomorrow or maybe I'll love it more. For right now, it's a very interesting read.

[J.A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The trouble in reviewing a book like Brandon Shimoda’s The Girl Without Arms is that no matter what the reviewer says, no matter what excerpts are culled, the text will remain very difficult to define without simply saying: go read this book for yourself and see what you find in it..."

Read the full review at PANK: http://www.pankmagazine.com/pankblog/...

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

a poem review for a book of poetry:

"i do not have an amputee fetish"

the other day i saw a man with a
hook for a hand and the hook was two hooks
that scissored together to grab things
and i wondered if it was wired into his tendons somehow
or how that worked and i looked at my hand and flexed my
fingers without even really having to think about it
and if i had a hook for a hand or like edward
scissors i could still hold a girl without arms
but she wouldnt be able to
hold me

[Carrie Lorig · Rating 4 out of 5]

paralyzed by the grass of it.

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very intense poetry read. Perhaps too intense at times. The language is thick with sex, want, cruelty, and violent realizations of a self nourished by mother's milk.