Drowning in the Floating World

by Meg Eden

Drowning in the Floating World immerses us into the Japanese natural disaster known as 3/11: the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, and subsequent Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Relentless as the disaster itself, Eden seizes control of our deepest emotional centers, and, through insightful perspective, holds us in consideration of loss, helplessness, upheaval, and, perhaps most stirring, what do make of, and do with, survival. Her collection is also a cultural education, sure to encourage further reading and research. Drowning in the Floating World is, itself, a tsunami stone—a warning beacon to remind us to learn from disaster and, in doing so, honor all that’s lost.

Genres: Poetry

Unknown Binding

Published March 1, 2020

About the author

Meg Eden Kuyatt teaches creative writing at colleges and writing centers. She is the author of the 2021 Towson Prize for Literature winning poetry collection “Drowning in the Floating World” (Press 53, 2020) and children’s novels, most recently “Good Different,” a JLG Gold Standard selection (Scholastic, 2023). Find her online at https://linktr.ee/medenauthor.

Reviews

[Britt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow.

Let it be known that I don’t really read a whole lot of poetry. It’s usually, just, not really my thing.

But this collection was breathtaking.

Now, I have absolutely no idea if the author had any actual experience dealing with the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, or if she personally knows anyone who did. But, either way — this was incredible and heart wrenching to read. If she did deal with this natural disaster firsthand, then I have the upmost respect for her for being able to account it in such a way. Or, if she doesn’t have any actual experience with it... well, she definitely writes it in a way that makes it feel like she does.

I loved every single second of this. She doesn’t stick to just one stylistic type, and some of the poems read more like short stories. The imagery is absolutely incredible, some of the best poetic imagery I’ve read, and the amount of emotion I found in these poems took my breath away. They are incredible to experience. The summary of the collection itself reads that the poems are, “Relentless as the disaster itself,” and I very much have to agree. It was amazing.

As I said with the one other poetry collection I have reviewed (hey... at least what I do read of poetry is pretty damn good), the raw emotion in this collection is simply incredible. You do not need to have experienced the disaster yourself to be moved by the incredible power of this work.

Overall... the subject matter is intense, yes. But if you can handle it, I definitely recommend this collection. It is absolutely incredible, and I’m still feeling the power of this work having finished reading it, as I type this review. Incredible, breathtaking... and most *definitely* worth the read.

[Christian Angeles · Rating 5 out of 5]

In “Drowning in The Floating World,” author Meg Eden assembles a collection of evocative poetry about the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami and the subsequent Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.

Using a skillful assortment of styles, “Drowning in a Floating World” explores many themes associated with cataclysm and tragedy, depicting helplessness in the wake of a grand catastrophe and how it feels to have to pick up the pieces in the aftermath.

These narratives, each unique in its own discourse and disclosure, confronts the fatalities of these tragic and historic events, and how crescendoing waves of sudden death forever terraformed both the landscape and the community. How a government failed its people. The lives were lost and never found: siblings, mothers, and even children, forever encapsulated in the haunting imagery of the no-named bodies and drowned corpses.

It’s as brilliantly touching as it is heart-wrenching.

The author has such a beautiful way with language, utilizing sensory details and varied approaches to the theme of water, which holds multiple useful definitions throughout the mythos of the story.

The work shares a common thread about drowning, though it is mostly utilized in environmental depictions of saturnine gloom. The sensation is overwhelming; if not by being surrounded by water, then by the feelings of a now lost history and a haunting resonance in the air. There is an emphasis on each person: who they once were, and what they meant when they were alive before they drowned away. Each poem, an effigy dedicated to loss and longing, exposes the uncomfortable malaise associated with the guilt of surviving when so many had not.

The end of the book provides some facts on the inspiration behind each poem. As the author seeks to educate, she leaves behind footnotes. Eden takes into account the different things that most haven’t noticed before, in a way that poems about the ghosts of a place can only do: elicit emotions out of the unspoken to form spoken truths.

[Steph Warren · Rating 4 out of 5]

*I received a free ARC of this book, with thanks to the author. The decision to review and my opinions are my own.*

The poems in this collection are drenched with the bleak devastation that these terrifying natural disasters wrought on the lost and on the left behind.

It is clear that the author has personal experience of Japan, and her poetry paints a picture of affection, sympathetic grief and stark respect, as she weaves the lore of kitsune and kappa, ghosts and spirits, through the very real consequences of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, tsunami and resultant Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant reactor meltdown.

Imbued with raw emotion and a wealth of cultural knowledge about Japanese traditions and beliefs, Meg Eden brings the trauma of these events alive in a way that leaves the reader reeling at the destruction, haunted by the desolate aftermath, and awestruck at the mammoth task of rebuilding that falls to the grief-stricken.

Eden experiments with words, punctuation and form throughout her poems, creating very different effects as she moves from dead whales, to abandoned dolls, to ‘radium girls’. Most of the poems are fairly short, yet each one encapsulates a whole story of its own, carrying imagery that perfectly captures a mood, a setting, an intimacy of thought or feeling.

At the end of the collection, the author has included notes about the inspiration and factual basis for each poem, which led me inexorably down a path of further research – seeking out pictures, news reports and other accounts and educating myself a little more about an event that had only distantly touched on my consciousness before.

Anyone already interested in these disasters and the human costs will find these poems a valuable resource, and anyone coming to these tragedies without prior knowledge will find them am emotional, educational, introduction. And, of course, poetry lovers will appreciate the skilful writing.


Review by Steph Warren of Bookshine and Readbows blog

[Sabreena T · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stars: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Disclaimer: this book was sent to me by the author in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions below are my own.

Content warning: as this collection is about disasters where many people died, some of the quotes in this review may be triggering. Nearly all of the poems in the collection reference death/people dying and loss of people/possessions; there is also one poem that references “the burusera addiction” which is when adults find arousal in children’s clothing (I also discuss this below).

Drowning in the Floating World is a collection of poems about the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, and subsequent Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. The poems delve into what surviving these disasters was like and the trauma that people faced, both immediately after the disasters and over time.

“That First Night, the Hospital
was the only thing left standing.
…
Over the dark, people floated, crying
for help, crying as if there was any way
we could get them out of the water,
as if there was any room here.”

Eden’s poems were definitely evocative. As I was reading, I could see the story she was telling, and I felt intense emotion at what these people had lost. Nearly every page pulled some kind of emotion from me: sadness, anger, and even disgust.

I think what I struggled with was that these are three massive (and connected) disasters that had long-term effects on the people that lived there and around the world, but this collection is less than 60 pages long. It felt… odd? I’m not entirely sure if that’s the right word to explain my feelings, but I can’t come up with another right now…

“…she says They are burying us inside our own waste because no one wants to look at us and feel guilty no one wants to remember what went wrong or change anything everyone wants to go back to work back to their homes and return to what they’ve always done…”

To be fair, I wouldn’t say I know a lot about these disasters. I know they happened, and I remember the devastation on the news. The aftermath and long-term effects, however, I don’t know much about.

I do think with the vivid writing and harsh reality of the poems, this collection will become a great resource for those who are researching the disasters.

“Cleaning up the beach reminds me
of cleaning my room, only now
my room is the ocean
& everyday someone comes in
& pours trash in my bed
so that I’m sleeping on filth.”

I did find the one poem about the “burusera addiction” to be quite… random, among other things. The author explains the addiction as grown men finding hope and arousal in children’s clothing. Again, while it is a short poem, it is very detailed, and I do think it could be triggering for people.

This was not something I expected to read in a collection about an earthquake and tsunami, but I think it was meant to be tied to the aftermath and people needing to find hope in different things. That’s the only thing I can think of, and it makes me extremely uncomfortable that anyone would find arousal in children’s clothing. I can understand someone finding hope in a child’s shirt in the abstract “they are our future” type of way, but arousal from a child’s underwear is not okay.

The author includes a note at the end of the collection explaining that when she doesn’t understand something, she writes a poem about it to help her briefly inhabit that perspective. While she doesn’t condone the act, she understands “the humanness that invokes and abides in that experience.” I do not and don’t think that poem needed to be included, but that is my personal preference.

Poems are meant to evoke an emotion from us, and Meg Eden’s Drowning in the Floating World collection definitely does that. It is short, but delivers a punch. Anyone who is interested in learning more about the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster should definitely read this collection.

Thanks again to Meg Eden for sending me a copy of this book to read and review!

Drowning in the Floating World releases in March 2020.

Note: All quotes above were taken from an advance reader’s edition of the book, and are subject to change in the final release.

[Ally · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brutal.

Drowning in the Floating world is a heart-wrenching book filled with a series of poems that followed the aftermath of Japan’s 2011 tsunami and Fukushima plant disaster. Each poem takes a new perspective of the individuals, buildings and animals who endured the aftermath.

Stories of mothers swallowed up by the sea; siblings wondering where their other half went; toys missing their owners; buildings confused on their emptiness; animals desperately wanting to be reunited; unforgiving waters that gave new meanings to thousands of people.

The 2011 tsunami was the aftermath of a 9.0 earthquake 130 km east from Japan’s shores. The northeastern coast towns of Kamaishi, Sendai, Miyako, Ishinomaki, Kesennuma, Shiogama, Kitaibaraki and Hitachinaka were underwater the due 10 meter waves that travelled more than 10km inland. The waves decimated towns and took away the bodies of thousands of victims when it retreated. The earthquake also affected the Fukushima nuclear power plant that forced the nearby residents to flee the radiation filled zone creating an eerie ghost town.

Meg Eden used her experience and her connection to Japan to tell the stories which those who have no voice. Just the like the debris-filled waters, Eden shows no mercy in displaying the agony through Western and Eastern poetic forms. She explores the complexity of grief of the dead and the survivors while illustrating how local and global responses to the tragedy when people were lost in their own suffering.

This book is not for the faint of heart, for its raw power will give you pain and tear stricken cheeks that will remind you how easily everything can be lost to the hand of Mother Earth. This is not an ode to disasters, but a memory of events that are can be forgotten by those who did not suffer through its moments. The poems in this book create a much-needed empathy for those who have never experience life-changing disasters in their lifetime.

Read if you have the heart.

[Derek · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a stunning book of poetry: magnificent and powerful, it pulls you in emotionally and aesthetically with the force of the very tsunami that is its subject. Drowning in the Floating World, even as it speaks to vast human suffering, also finds transcendence through the meaning evoked by its words and images. While timeless, it connects at a deep, almost unconscious level with our present moment, and the form--varied and radically innovative--is organically one with the subject. It is a moving and vitally important work.

[Meg Eden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Biased as the author :)

[M Delea · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been buying a lot of contemporary poetry books over the last year or so, and this one really stands out. I read it front to back, and enjoyed so much about it.

The author’s focus is the tsunami that hit Japan in 2011, the result of an earthquake. The tsunami led to a nuclear power plant disaster.

The author has this one focus as far as a subject, but writes poems in a variety of forms and voices. There are
traditional free verse, experimental, prose, skinny poems, and poems written in couplets, poems written in sections, and very short poems and long poems. I enjoyed this mix; in fact, I prefer it to books in which every poem has the same form (which seems to be the trend).

I must admit to being enchanted by the title, even before I knew anything about the book. The sad beauty of the title continues throughout the book in language, voices, and images.

The beginning of the book’s first poem:

The day is gray with a beach
covered in whales. Sand

becomes water and water
an uninhabitable place.

These two stunning couplets capture so much of what follows.

I think this book would be enjoyed by poets and regular readers of poetry, of course, but also those interested in Japan, in grief, in ecological disasters, in this particular event, and anyone who wants to start reading poetry.

A lovely and amazing collection of poems.

[Rodd Whelpley · Rating 5 out of 5]

How quickly / the body unfolds / like a paper crane (from "Atom")

This collection is a frightening - but artistically delightful - mix of free verse and formal poems, each of which unfolds (or in some way, like the waters after a flood, recedes) to reveal a singular human anguish in the wake of the 2011 tsunami in Japan and the concomitant Fukushima nuclear disaster. I get the impression that the quiet resilience of each poem mirrors the people who inspired them. These are now a people who simultaneously but privately must come to terms with the deaths of their lives as they knew them and with the deaths of many of those with whom they shared those now lost ways of living. These are poetic narratives of how we endure by making room for people who now exist for us in ways we perhaps are not prepared for: “the old woman who visits me for tea is dead but I don’t have the heart to tell her.” These poems drown the distinctions we think we’ve so carefully constructed between the living and the dead.

[Paula · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was working for Public Radio International when the tsunami happened, followed by the Fukushima nuclear disaster. I heard some very stunning reporting, but nothing like the poems Meg Eden is compelled to write. To read them over a decade after the disaster is - well, the reviewers on the back cover have a hard time not using the word "haunting." All I can say to that is thank God they still speak that tongue.

[Clifford · Rating 5 out of 5]

As the tenth anniversary of the horrific Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami approaches, I read these poems with a kind of terror. The disaster killed at least 28,000 people and continues to impact Japan and the world today. The poems are stark and often shocking, which gives them a rare kind of power.

[Gabby Gilliam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hauntingly beautiful poetry.