Under a Future Sky

by Brynn Saito

Brynn Saito takes her readers on a journey with her father to the desert prison at Gila River where, over 80 years ago, her grandparents met and made a life together. Born of an unquenchable desire to animate the shadow archive, Saito’s poetry sings a song of rage, confusion, and, ultimately, love; descendants of wartime incarceration exchange dreams, mothers become water goddesses, and a modern daughter haunts future ruins. Mystical inclinations, yellow cedars, and sisterhood make a balm for trauma’s scars. This work opens a dialogue between the past and present, radical ancestor and future child, desert prison and family garden.

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Hardcover

Published August 15, 2023

About the author

Brynn Saito’s third book of poetry, Under a Future Sky, will be published in August 2023 by Red Hen Press. She is the recipient of the Benjamin Saltman Award and her poems have appeared in the New York Times and American Poetry Review. Brynn lives in the traditional homelands of the Yokuts and Mono peoples (also known as Fresno, CA), where she is an Assistant Professor at California State University, Fresno and co-director of Yonsei Memory Project.

Reviews

[summer · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were some amazing passages, but some of them were so badly written that it shocked me that it was the same writer.

[lellysbooknook · Rating 5 out of 5]

the amount of lines in this collection that made me emotional is insane. there is such a strong voice in these poems, one of longing & understanding. i’ll hold many of her words, so very close.

[Evelyn Jean · Rating 5 out of 5]

Under a Future Sky by Brynn Saito is a breathtaking poetic odyssey that bridges generations, memory, and the quiet persistence of love across time. Through luminous language and spiritual clarity, Saito transforms inherited trauma into song a reclamation of both history and self.

Each poem unfolds like a ritual of remembrance, tracing the shadows of the desert prison at Gila River where her grandparents once lived and loved amid wartime incarceration. From these echoes of confinement, Saito conjures a fierce tenderness descendants speaking to their ancestors, daughters becoming water, and memory reborn as myth.

Her voice is both intimate and transcendent, revealing the sacred act of storytelling as a way of healing collective wounds. The balance she strikes between grief and renewal, rage and reverence, is masterful.

Under a Future Sky isn’t merely a book of poems; it’s a spiritual archive a dialogue between past and present, ancestor and descendant, trauma and transformation. Saito’s words shimmer with remembrance and resilience, reminding us that poetry can indeed make whole what history tried to break.

[Mackensi Green · Rating 5 out of 5]

Saito has such a strong grasp of language and her ideas of nonlinear time and the ancestral will never not be interesting to me. When a Saito poems appears in front of me, I’m listening.