{"title":"Garrett Hongo","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"perfect-sound-book-garrett-hongo-9780375425066","title":"The Perfect Sound","description":"\u003cb\u003eA poet's audio obsession, from collecting his earliest vinyl to his quest for the ideal vacuum tubes. A captivating book that \"ingeniously mixes personal memoir with cultural history and offers us an indispensable guide for the search of acoustic truth\" (Yunte Huang, author of \u003ci\u003eCharlie Chan\u003c\/i\u003e).\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Garrett Hongo's passion for audio dates back to the Empire 398 turntable his father paired with a Dynakit tube amplifier in their modest tract home in Los Angeles in the early 1960s. But his adult quest begins in the CD-changer era, as he seeks out speakers and amps both powerful and refined enough to honor the top notes of the greatest opera sopranos. In recounting this search, he describes a journey of identity where meaning, fulfillment, and even liberation were often most available to him through music and its astonishingly varied delivery systems.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Hongo writes about the sound of surf being his first music as a kid in Hawai'i, about doo-wop and soul reaching out to him while growing up among Black and Asian classmates in L.A., about Rilke and Joni Mitchell as the twin poets of his adolescence, and about feeling the pulse of John Coltrane's jazz and the rhythmic chords of Billy Joel's piano from his car radio while driving the freeways as a young man trying to become a poet.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Journeying further, he visits devoted collectors of decades-old audio gear as well as designers of the latest tube equipment, listens to sublime arias performed at La Scala, hears a ghostly lute at the grave of English Romantic poet John Keats in Rome, drinks in wisdom from blues musicians and a diversity of poetic elders while turning his ear toward the memory-rich strains of the music that has shaped him: Hawaiian steel guitar and canefield songs; Bach and the Band; Mingus, Puccini, and Duke Ellington. And in the decades-long process of perfecting his stereo setup, Hongo also discovers his own now-celebrated poetic voice.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49742035779857,"sku":"NGR9780375425066","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50664912388369,"sku":"CIN0375425063VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51415731994897,"sku":"CIN0375425063G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52437531754769,"sku":"GOR014524982","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0375425063.jpg?v=1750813632"},{"product_id":"perfect-sound-book-garrett-hongo-9780307386360","title":"The Perfect Sound","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49749941190929,"sku":"NGR9780307386359","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50205397680401,"sku":"CIN030738635XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51000756044049,"sku":"NIN9780307386359","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52819549323537,"sku":"CIN030738635XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/030738635X.jpg?v=1751449931"},{"product_id":"volcano-book-garrett-hongo-9780679767480","title":"Volcano","description":"Part memoir, part Japanese American family chronicle, part luminous work of natural history, Volcano tells what happened when Hongo returned to his birthplace in Hawai'i, as a young man, to reclaim its dreamlike landscape and his own elusive past. A magnificant evocation of heritage and place.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50093025591569,"sku":"CIN0679767487G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51005605445905,"sku":"NIN9780679767480","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51460731339025,"sku":"CIN0679767487VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0679767487.jpg?v=1750743625"},{"product_id":"coral-road-book-garrett-hongo-9780375712043","title":"Coral Road","description":"Garrett Hongo's long-awaited third collection of poems is a beautiful, elegiac gathering of his Japanese-American ancestors in their Hawaiian landscape and a testament to the power of poetry, as it brings their marginalized yet heroic narratives into the realm of art.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e In \u003ci\u003eCoral Road\u003c\/i\u003e Hongo explores the history of the impermanent homeland his ancestors found on the island of O'ahu after their immigration from southern Japan, and meditates on the dramatic tales of the islands. In sumptuous narrative poems he takes up strands of family stories and what he calls \"a long legacy of silence\" about their experience as contract laborers along the North Shore of the island. In the opening sequence, he brings to life the story of his great-grandparents fleeing from one plantation to another, finding their way by moonlight along coral roads and railroad tracks. As his grandmother, a girl of ten with an infant on her back, traverses \"twelve-score stands of cane \/ chittering like small birds, nocturnal harpies in the feral constancies of wind,\" Hongo asks, \"Where is the Virgil who might lead me through the shallow underworld of this history?\" In fact, it is Hongo who guides himself--and us--as, in these devoted acts of recollection, he seeks to dispel the dislocation at the center of his legacy.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e The love of art--making beauty in however provisional a culture--has clearly been a guiding principle in Hongo's poetry. In this content-rich verse, Hongo hearkens to and delivers \"the luminous and the anecdotal,\" bringing forth a complete aesthetic experience from the shards that make up a life.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50159563833617,"sku":"CIN0375712046VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51001850429713,"sku":"NIN9780375712043","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52147791790353,"sku":"NLS9780375712043","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53076659175697,"sku":"CIN0375712046G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0375712046.jpg?v=1751260386"},{"product_id":"coral-road-book-garrett-hongo-9780307594761","title":"Coral Road","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50347516297489,"sku":"CIN0307594769G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0307594769.jpg?v=1751324062"},{"product_id":"river-of-heaven-book-garrett-hongo-9780887483585","title":"The River of Heaven","description":"The River of Heaven was awarded the 1987 Lamont Poetry Prize of the Academy of American Poets for a distinguished second book of poems (judges: Philip Booth, Alfred Corn, Mary Oliver). In it Garrett Hongo has drawn from his unusual background (born in Volcano, Hawaii, of Japanese ancestry, and educated in California at Pomona) to provide the materials for poems that would be highly exotic were they not infused with a level-headed sense of realism and a strong feeling that mundane realities are perfectly natural material for the poetry of our time. Here, Garrett Hongo transforms his mundane realities into elegant poetry. The volcanoes of Hawaii, the gritty urban streets of Los Angeles, a California beach after the death of his father--the places of Garrett Hongo's past metamorphose into a poetry that is compelling and immediate.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50373213028625,"sku":"CIN0887483585A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51201372782865,"sku":"NGR9780887483585","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0887483585.jpg?v=1750746985"},{"product_id":"ocean-of-clouds-book-garrett-hongo-9780593802038","title":"Ocean of Clouds","description":"\u003cb\u003eNAMED AN ESSENTIAL READ OF THE YEAR BY \u003ci\u003eTHE New Yorker .\u003c\/i\u003e In his fourth book of poems, award-winning poet Garrett Hongo sees coastlines and waters, skylines and ancestral lines for what they inspire and teach.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e In a surpassingly beautiful collection of poems, with his characteristic long-lined, rolling music, Hongo is alert to the possibilities of individual moments of perception and grace in the landscapes of his life, whether waiting for a ferry in Balboa after a writing workshop (\"An oil slick from a yacht . . . \/ Spread rainbows on the water, an aleph \/ curving toward us\") or hanging out and playing LPs with the late, great poet Michael Harper, or watching his daughter in the sun with a halo of messy twelve-year-old's hair, or listening to the sea, which speaks to him in so many places- at the Wai'opae Tidepools, at Cassis, at Divi Bay in Saint Martin, where, he tells us, \"I thought of writing to the soul of N zim Hikmet, \/ saying loving a woman was like writing a book- \/ . . . it is love's body on which you write a page of kisses . . .\"\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e These poems of cloudy moons and sandstone cliffsides, the black glass of lava shattered into sands, waves surging, and stories of a poet's gratitude for the journey he has made, come together to make a paean against forgetting.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51631256371473,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51631256699153,"sku":"NGR9780593802038","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51804299821329,"sku":"CIN0593802039G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52496528539921,"sku":"NIN9780593802038","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52599387848977,"sku":"CIN0593802039VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0593802039.jpg?v=1769683944"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-garrett-hongo.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}