Pier

by Janine Oshiro

Seeking to identify the self that straddles both spiritual and physical worlds, Janine Oshiro's multidimensional poems are borderlands—wild and uncontained—where 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.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published September 13, 2011

Reviews

[Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a mournful book of exquisite language, loss, and incredible beauty -- in the craft of the poems and in the speaker's unrelenting attempts to greet pain and grief and mystery and all these huge, unknowable things. Also, like all good poetry, I just appreciate how the poems manage to enliven language, making me see words, and consequently the world, afresh.

February

I went to the river to make
myself feel better on the second
day of the midwinter thaw.
I wanted to stand on the floating
dock to feel something,
I thought, dangerous as if
its stays -- frozen over --
could have split, and broken
off I could have drifted
down like ice. But
the dock stayed, only partially
iced in, a ruin of water
gathering dull white fish
at the surface. Underneath
the still surface water
water kept a quicker flow.
Along the river bank
sloped spilling snow
and ice that seeped into
the exhausted suck of grass.

The willow shined.
Each hanging whip adorned
with hardened buds that clung
like talons. Beneath it,
half in water, half
on ice, a goose had made
or found an icy crevice
for its body. Its feathers stood
out oddly at a ruffle, almost
tucked in. At first
I thought it was falling
asleep, its limp neck
curling down and sliding on
the ice. Its neck
jerked up, it shook, it bent
its neck. I watched
it ribbon down and stiffen
up. I watched it ribbon
down. It was not spring.

[Esabetta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful. I read this slowly, in one sitting. The poems are locked up within one another, each one wholly necessary for the entire telling. I had a strong feeling of cohesion and completeness as I was reading. With the choices of poems and order of movement, it felt inevitable...as though I was always where I needed to be.