Yuki Tanaka’s stunning debut, Chronicle of Drifting, explores rootlessness, its beauty and perils. Tanaka’s restless imagination roams among places and personae—a village mermaid, a geisha in the Midwest, a flâneur in Tokyo—searching for a permanent self and a sense of community. In the feverish world of these poems, inspired by the Japanese tradition of tanka and haiku, as well as by timeless surrealism, one meets a light-lashed horse, an imaginary chauffeur, an out-of-business psychic, a girl who skewers a fish with a flower stalk. In poems ranging from lyric to prose, Tanaka creates a poignant dreamlike realm where the inner and outer worlds, the self and others, merge—like the train passenger who, looking out the window and seeing the sky through his reflection, feels “empty, a blue outline.”
ISBN: 9781556597053
Format: Paperback
“Yuki Tanaka’s invitation into his head is a mind-blowing adventure, like a seeing the world through Lewis Carroll’s looking-glass.”—London Grip
“Tanaka’s singular view, somewhat detached yet not lacking in compassion, soberly reckoning while allowing for flights of optimism, is, again, the product of the angle of vision of the flaneur, the stranger in town, the person who has seen it all but decides not to linger on individual premises too long. . . . This discreet version of the ‘I’ as a drifting, neutral observer in the war zone that is life—not Tanaka’s only attitude, but a prevalent one—offers a valuable refinement of the poetic speaker, less self-centered, at most a participant-observer. Of his many gifts in this sterling debut collection, Tanaka’s discreet and subtle management of tone sits uppermost. In offering it consistently, he invites us, too, whether casual reader or professional poet, to commit to our own drifting, which just might, if carefully husbanded, lead to our own chronicle.”—Johnny Payne, Merion West