Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From

by Sawako Nakayasu

In Sawako Nakayasu’s first poetry collection in seven years, an unsettling diaspora of “girls” is deployed as poetic form, as reclamation of diminutive pseudo-slur, and as characters that take up residence between the thick border zones of language, culture, and shifting identity. Written in response to Nakayasu’s 2017 return to the US, this maximalist collection invites us to reexamine our own complicity in reinforcing literary convention. The book radicalizes notions of “translation” as both process and product, running a kind of linguistic interference that is intimate, feminist, and playfully jagged.

Genres: Poetry, Japan, Japanese Literature

135 pages, Paperback

Published October 6, 2020

About the author

SAWAKO NAKAYASU's books include So we have been given time Or, (Verse, 2004) Nothing fictional but the accuracy or arrangement (she, (forthcoming from Quale Press, 2005) and Clutch (Tinfish chapbook, 2002). Find more info here: http://www.factorial.org/sn/sn_home.html

Reviews

[Luca · Rating 4 out of 5]

amazing
incredible
so weird
visionary

poems about translation in translation with collaborators
that relish in the residue between languages between countries between cultures between bodies
that play with the lie-lie the ロ口—to enjoy, you have to play along, and maybe bring a friend along.

this one put my 日本語能力 to the test and to the クイズ (fill in the __), and made me vomit out my high school french, and pass it along for helupu (omg gross but america, quel drôle de pays). don't worry, there's always a cheat sheet, and when in doubt, make a bilingual friend, it's not that hard. my chinese-speaking friend marina came in clutch, and it was really fun to marvel at the weirdness together.

once, I took a weaving class, and we talked about good weavings dynamic weavings that make you see different things up close and far away.
good poetry dynamic poetry can do this too, can change based on how you read, can change how you read.

[S P · Rating 5 out of 5]

'People ask where I'm from and I've no choice but to say that I'm from the mountains, and then depending on the number of twitches I count on their face, I lie and say I'm from this mountain or that mountain, in this or that state. The facial expression that leads me to fess up and say I am from Awa're-zan, the mountain where desperately starving young men would carry their old grandmas on their backs and leave them deep in the woods to wither and die, except that these old grandmas developed their own community of mountain hags and managed to live a grand old life, burrowing into the mountainside only when they were truly done with life and not when some ungrateful unresourceful son had decided to get rid of them, and yeah I'm one of those girls that is actually a reborn mountain hag—well that facial expression is quite wonderful and amazing and I have yet to come up with a name for ti—what about you, where are you from?'

('Mountain Girls', p71)

[Renee Morales · Rating 5 out of 5]

Slower for me but just because Nakayasu’s capacity for unsettling is unrelenting. Really fabulous though it took me months, and I’d recommend anyone to read it. It’s puzzling me still, and might always!

“By turning ourselves / into bullets we’ll finally rid ourselves of the baggage of being female. / We’ll be free. We’ll be powerful. We’ll burn it all to the ground.”

“I shake them off. I am woman, stopped small gait of it too. I eye you, / I you you, I fatten my eye for the sake of heat. I shape your well- / intentioned hand into mine, hold tightly until we marble. The site of / our marbling is both interior and exterior, which makes the timing / of escape difficult to determine with precision, which was the plan / all along, the long-nested night of my you, my enterprise.”

“Extinguished phone call, I give you everything anyway.”

I dog-earred almost every page, if that helps.

[kathleen]

loved this. i think it's hard to be weird in the way that nakayasu is

[Jed]

review tk

[HoneyBakedAmbs · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved it. The conceit of the alphabet-named girls existing and interacting in the weird and awful (and magical) spaces created for them was gorgeous.

I find it interesting that some of these reviews mention “getting” the poetry ... that seems so beside the point to me? The words paint a beautiful picture that provokes thought from numerous angles and at several layers. I’ll read it again and again.

Especially loved “Girl Soup” and “Mountain Girls.”

[Dawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anger that is electric and rhizomatic. These modes of translation are deeply distrustful of their readers (and don’t mince words about it). I felt a bit of a ‘hell-yeah’ about this book while also feeling pretty implicated by its contents.

[Lyra Montoya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really liked the use of language and translation of poems multiple times. The use of food metaphor felt less cliche than in some places that I've seen it, possibly because it was in the overlap of both femininity as consumable and also ties between asianness and culture and food. I got some Japanese practice while reading this book which was actually quite fun for me. I could make my best guess at the french since I at least had a sense for how the words would sound. No such case for the Chinese.

Some of my friends who speak Mandarin said that the poems written in Chinese felt somewhat odd to them. I wonder if that's partly because it's through translation, or if it's that the translator learned Chinese as a secondary language, or some mix, or otherwise. Given that the grammar in all the poems written in Japanese felt really clear to me (often not the case lol) I wonder if the same is true for those translations in that the translator knows a version of Japanese which is that of a secondary language.

When I was at my late grandmother's house, one of the things we found in a box were a bunch of round little paper hina style doll keychains, and the multitude of similarly styled femininities in collection made me think of the fragmented girls within Nakayasu and other girls. I have a small box of 10 of these that i now keep with me, perhaps these are my girls A through J. Perhaps its some subcollection of my grandmother's even more numerous girls.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

We are the sippers, the big dippers, and Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From is a bowl of Girl Soup.

Each “girl” in Nakayasu’s poems is a singular morsel. Formed as an escape team, they breach the rim and gather along the bottom-most convex of a giant spoon in order to plan first the manifestation of the droplet, then its descent.

Mid-fall, they crash into our hands, but before we get the chance to lick them up, they slip through our desperate fingertips, and are lost in the remarkably dense body of liquid from which they came. We will never swallow these droplets because we are made to never find them again.

These girls are options, paths, each falling into parallel bowls of soup, manifested by decisions and indecisions, translations and mistranslations, playing out what we have been, what we are, and what we could be.

[Alex Nonymous · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thanks to the publisher for providing an eARC of Some Girls Walk Into the Country They Are From in exchange for an honest review.

This is the kind of thing you need to read at least 3 times before you understand it and then you're still completely and utterly lost but in a way that slowly starts to make sense.

I'm not going to pretend to be smart enough to have understood all of this, but the parts I did understand were wonderfully thought provoking and if you even understand one line of this, you'll find something to love.

[Sami · Rating 4 out of 5]

“While everyone else is busy crying over a communal loss of innocence, only Girl B is quietly at work, digging with their bare hands, gathering. From here it looks like dirt and from there it also looks like dirt, but from beneath the pile, from underneath the stuff that looks like dirt, it is the stuff that is getting away, that is what separates the stuff that looks like dirt from the stuff that also looks like dirt but is in fact the stuff that is getting away, fundamentally altering the nature of its existence…”

-GIRL B HAS BROUGHT A GIANT SHEET WITH THEM (p 21)

[Anna · Rating 2 out of 5]

"bed of windows, bed of forests, bed of engines, lie down... Those who fear those who run"

I'm honestly not sure how to rate this. I think most of it went over my head. There were some beautiful moments, but I just could not get into it.

Thanks to edelweiss for the ARC!

[Greg Bem · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lot of profound work in this book. The translations capture a huge spectrum. It would be helpful to have *some* explanations that guide the otherwise uniformed reader about the writers and translators. But the mystery provides its own reinforcement of the text.

[Kelly Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wasn't sure what to make of this collection until I got to "Girl Soup." After that poem, I would die for these girls. And reading "29 Years of Girls" on my 29th birthday? Unreal.

Nakayasu's imagining of phrase and translation is entrancing. Please read this so I can talk to you about it.

[Meesh Kislyakov · Rating 5 out of 5]

incredible, I think about this book constantly

[Marije de Wit · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. Just wow. And there is no getting over it. I will read this book many, many times more and I am looking forward to each en every one of those.

[Ælias · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm absolutely floored by how good this is

[isra · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.50 💫

Had no idea what she was doing. Good.

[Abbigail K · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such an excellent collection! Very creative and inventive structure about the intersection of living under capitalism, multiculturalism, and patriarchy.

[Ivan Zhao · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of the most stunning things i've read in a while and honestly I need nakayasu to be my mother

[danielle; ▵ · Rating 1 out of 5]

Too sparse of good things to be itself a good thing (or a reminder that I do not, in general, enjoy poetry).