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Mama
44 pages, Hardcover
Published June 27, 2025
About the author
Michelle Naka Pierce
12 books27 followersMichelle Naka Pierce is the author of Continuous Frieze Bordering Red, awarded the POL Editor's Prize (Fordham, 2012); She, A Blueprint, a text/image document with collage art by Sue Hammond West (2011); Beloved Integer (2007); and co-author of TRI/VIA with Veronica Corpuz (2003). She has lived in Yokohama, Japan; London, UK; and currently teaches writing at Naropa University in Boulder, CO, where she is the director of the Jack Kerouac School.
Interview: http://www.tarpaulinsky.com/Summer08/...
Interview: http://www.tarpaulinsky.com/Summer08/...
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
July 30, 2025
MAMA is a quiet vow and luminous act of filial witnessing. It’s a gesture toward memory—its fading and fracture—as a site of poetic excavation. A remarkable act of love, elegy, and devotion.
This poem (thirty years in the making and excerpted from Sutured Memorī) moves between wartime recollection and the tender unspooling of a mother’s memory. An interplay of archival echoes and shifting consciousness, it aligns with the Japanese zuihitsu (随筆) form (“follow the brush”) which Pierce adapts with lyrical precision.
Pierce’s mother recalls the firebombing of Tokyo on continuous loop: war-scarred memory refracted through the lens of fading memory. Pierce stitches grief and history, Japanese and English, archival residue and embodied presence—“memory is all one body” becoming both leitmotif and prayer. She writes, “Dear Mama. I promise to listen … To write what you can no longer say. Dear Mama. Dear Mama. I promise.” As Pierce pledges, the reader becomes witness, honoring the silences and fragments left behind.
I look forward to reading Sutured Memorī in its entirety.
This poem (thirty years in the making and excerpted from Sutured Memorī) moves between wartime recollection and the tender unspooling of a mother’s memory. An interplay of archival echoes and shifting consciousness, it aligns with the Japanese zuihitsu (随筆) form (“follow the brush”) which Pierce adapts with lyrical precision.
Pierce’s mother recalls the firebombing of Tokyo on continuous loop: war-scarred memory refracted through the lens of fading memory. Pierce stitches grief and history, Japanese and English, archival residue and embodied presence—“memory is all one body” becoming both leitmotif and prayer. She writes, “Dear Mama. I promise to listen … To write what you can no longer say. Dear Mama. Dear Mama. I promise.” As Pierce pledges, the reader becomes witness, honoring the silences and fragments left behind.
I look forward to reading Sutured Memorī in its entirety.
Displaying 1 of 1 review