shima: Poems

by Sho Yamagushiku

A vivid, expansive vision of intergenerational witness and repair.

The village is tilting on its axis. It is turning. All its organs are spilling into the bay.

Shima is a mosaic of the emotional, psychic, and generational toll that exile from a pillaged culture impresses on a poet and his community. Come to haunt Yamagushiku’s practice of ancestor veneration are photographs and a narrative that spans his own life and a mythic parallel filled with a voice as spare as it is present, yearning as it is precise. Speaking through a cultural amnesia collected between a sunken past and a sensed, ghostly-dreamed future, Shima anchors the poet’s interrogation of the relationship between father and son in the fragile connective tissue of memory where the poet’s homeland is an impossible destination. I am taking the sharpest stick and poking the root ancestor. I am insisting that if he awakens I will have something useful to say.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

Published March 26, 2024

Reviews

[Tina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved these poems!
Thank you to the publisher for my gifted review copy!

[Clover · Rating 3 out of 5]

3/5

This one wasn't really for me. But it was interesting to read and see the formatting that was chosen. There's no titles for the poems, but it is separated into four named sections.

One of the verses I enjoyed most was from without yanbaru-yuu:
"With limited vision, Uto might
appear to follow behind her hus-
band through the archive. Yet,
Her life exceeds the hard scaf-
folding that often marks a man's
existence. She does not need the
materiality of data to become leg-
ible in the realm of ancestors."

Another from the uchinaa-yuu section:
"I dream of the boy
walking off the cliff emboldened
by a storm

but gravity refuses his body

and a tangle of ropes and roots
[....]
fastening him to life"

I'm proud to see local authors/poets/writers in the library! Yamagushiku lives in Victoria! This was an interesting collection and I'm hopeful this book will reach the hands of those who need it and connect with it.

Check your local libraries. Request they purchase this if they don't already have it. Support libraries and support authors.

[Lindsey]

“With limited vision, Uto might appear to follow behind her husband through the archive. Yet, her life exceeds the hard scaffolding that often marks a man’s existence. She does not need the materiality of data to become legible in the realm of the ancestors.”

[alexa · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘The trees taught me intimacy when the waking world ran from me’

IK THAT’S RIGHT omg this collection is stellar!

There’s an element of fantasy in his descriptions but like high-fantasy while still being grounded in truth beneath metaphor. Reminds me at times of ‘dream of me as water’ by David Ly which is a favourite collection of mine—something so tender and beautiful about aquatic imagery and queerness LMAO. Interesting that the poems aren’t titled but sectioned. Writing feels like a steady flowing current of introspection which I think works super well. One qualm I have are some of the choices for form esp in the early poems, the winding circular situation is not my favourite but I respect the contemporary abiding.

For poetry I usually indicate standout poems in my reviews, in this case seeing as there are no titles, I'd say ‘yanbaru-yuu’ the latter half is my favourite section!

[Yilin · Rating 5 out of 5]

beautiful and moving. powerful use of form.