{"title":"Brandon Shimoda","description":"\u003cp\u003eExplore the hauntingly beautiful works of Brandon Shimoda. His writing delves into memory, history, and identity with a poetic sensibility. Perfect for readers seeking profound and evocative narratives.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"evening-oracle-book-brandon-shimoda-9780988713758","title":"Evening Oracle","description":"Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. In EVENING ORACLE, Brandon Shimoda encounters shadows, specters, and women young and old, living and undead and finds himself standing in a graveyard in the middle of a rice field in a town that no longer exists. EVENING ORACLE is composed of poems originally handwritten at night before sleep in the beds of friends and strangers in Japan (2011-2012), and passages from emails and letters to and from friends and family on the subjects of fruit, vegetables, and dying grandparents. Featuring original poems by Dot Devota and Hiromi It, and correspondence by Etel Adnan, Don Mee Choi, Phil Cordelli, Youna Kwak, Quinn Latimer, Mary Ruefle, Rob Schlegel, and Karen McAlister Shimoda, among others.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49522686820625,"sku":"CIN0988713756G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51764981530897,"sku":"CIN0988713756VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52741060854033,"sku":"NIN9780988713758","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0988713756.jpg?v=1750749021"},{"product_id":"hydra-medusa-book-brandon-shimoda-9781643621715","title":"Hydra Medusa","description":"​A book of poetry, dreams and speculative talks, collected from the psychic detritus of living in the US-Mexico borderlands.  Part coping mechanism, part magical act, Hydra Medusa was composed while Brandon Shimoda was working five jobs and raising a child—during bus commutes, before bed, at sunrise. Encountering the ghosts of Japanese American ancestors, friends, children and bodies of water, it asks: what is the desert but a site where people have died, are dying; are buried, unburied, memorialized, erased. Where they are trying, against and within the energy of it all, to contend with our inherited present—and to live.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49571429941521,"sku":"GOR013730908","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49745478320401,"sku":"NGR9781643621715","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51157790032145,"sku":"NIN9781643621715","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52435578880273,"sku":"CIN1643621718VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52661886124305,"sku":"NLS9781643621715","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52940200182033,"sku":"CIN1643621718G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1643621718.jpg?v=1750864135"},{"product_id":"girl-without-arms-book-brandon-shimoda-9780984475230","title":"The Girl Without Arms","description":"The Girl Without Arms is a figure in Japanese folklore—a young girl whose arms are lopped off by her father, and is left to die in the mountains. The father, at the behest of his evil wife—the girl’s stepmother—lures the girl into the mountains at the promise of attending a neighboring festival. This is only the beginning of the tale.    The poems of Brandon Shimoda’s The Girl Without Arms are birthed of the rainy shut-in pause between steps forward and back in a season of great floods. In successive and interlocked sequences, these poems grapple with a seemingly unbridgeable confusion—related to love, the impossibility of life outside of love, and the unbearableness of life within it—as a way to give shape to the dark weather that permeates our lives, so as not to drown at its coming.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50298546159889,"sku":"CIN0984475230G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50515528057105,"sku":"CIN0984475230VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52683551768849,"sku":"NLS9780984475230","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0984475230.jpg?v=1750748450"},{"product_id":"grave-on-the-wall-book-brandon-shimoda-9780872867901","title":"The Grave on the Wall","description":"Winner of the 2020 PEN Open Book Award  Best of 2019: Nonfiction - Entropy Magazine  A memoir and book of mourning, a grandson’s attempt to reconcile his own uncontested citizenship with his grandfather’s lifelong struggle.  Award-winning poet Brandon Shimoda has crafted a lyrical portrait of his paternal grandfather, Midori Shimoda, whose life—child migrant, talented photographer, suspected enemy alien and spy, desert wanderer, American citizen—mirrors the arc of Japanese America in the twentieth century. In a series of pilgrimages, Shimoda records the search to find his grandfather, and unfolds, in the process, a moving elegy on memory and forgetting.  Praise for The Grave on the Wall:  \"Shimoda brings his poetic lyricism to this moving and elegant memoir, the structure of which reflects the fragmentation of memories. … It is at once wistful and devastating to see Midori's life come full circle … In between is a life with tragedy, love, and the horrors unleashed by the atomic bomb.\"—Booklist, starred review  \"In a weaving meditation, Brandon Shimoda pens an elegant eulogy for his grandfather Midori, yet also for the living, we who survive on the margins of graveyards and rituals of our own making.\"—Karen Tei Yamashita, author of Letters to Memory  \"Sometimes a work of art functions as a dream. At other times, a work of art functions as a conscience. In the tradition of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, Brandon Shimoda's The Grave on the Wall is both. It is also the type of fragmented reckoning only America could instigate.\"—Myriam Gurba, author of Mean  “Within this haunted sepulcher built out of silence, loss, and grief—its walls shadowed by the traumas of racial oppression and violence—a green river lined with peach trees flows beneath a bridge that leads back to the grandson.\"—Jeffrey Yang, author of Hey, Marfa: Poems  \"It is part dream, part memory, part forgetting, part identity. It is a remarkable exploration of how citizenship is forged by the brutal US imperial forces—through slave labor, forced detention, indiscriminate bombing, historical amnesia and wall. If someone asked me, Where are you from? I would answer, From The Grave on the Wall.\"—Don Mee Choi, author of Hardly War  \"Shimoda intercedes into the absences, gaps and interstices of the present and delves the presence of mystery. This mystery is part of each of us. Shimoda outlines that mystery in silence and silhouette, in objects left behind at site-specific travels to Japan and in the disparate facts of his grandpa’s FBI file. Gratitude to Brandon Shimoda for taking on the mystery which only literature accepts as the basic challenge.\"—Sesshu Foster, author of City of the Future  \"Shimoda is a mystic writer … He puts what breaches itself (always) onto the page, so that the act of writing becomes akin to paper-making: an attention to fibers, coagulation, texture and the water-fire mixtures that signal irreversible alteration or change. … he has written a book that touches the bottom of my own soul.\"—Bhanu Kapil, author of Ban en Banlieue  \"The Grave on the Wall is a passage of aching nostalgia and relentless assembly out of which something more important than objective truth is conjured—a ritual frisson, a veracity of spirit. I am grateful to have traveled along.”—Trisha Low, The Believer  \"It's not just a document from which Brandon Shimoda untangles the dead, but it's a portal through which the ghosts can show themselves to him. To exchange that kind of attention between the living and the dead is love.\"—Zachary Schomburg, Willamette Week","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50372394746129,"sku":"CIN0872867900G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50531258990865,"sku":"GOR013453794","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51009091862801,"sku":"NIN9780872867901","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51141232754961,"sku":"CIN0872867900VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52347644870929,"sku":"NLS9780872867901","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0872867900.jpg?v=1751011916"},{"product_id":"portuguese-book-brandon-shimoda-9781935639510","title":"Portuguese","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50394530414865,"sku":"CIN193563951XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53153177108753,"sku":"NIN9781935639510","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53153217511697,"sku":"CIN193563951XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/193563951X.jpg?v=1765447397"},{"product_id":"o-bon-book-brandon-shimoda-9781933959139","title":"O Bon","description":"\u003cp\u003ePoetry. Asian \u0026amp; Asian American Studies. Brandon Shimoda's third collection of poetry reflects on the poet's family history, specifically, the life of his grandfather, who was imprisoned in a U.S. internment camp during World War I. These often spare, gorgeously crafted poems are constructed and persist within and out of chilling landscapes--the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima, the underworld.--Academy of American Poets\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBrandon Shimoda is underground, in the realm of the dead. One hears 'the graceless steps of wandering spirits'--with them he wanders among trees, flowers, water, mixing them with the equally subtle presence of women whose bodies are weightless, who wander in his own life. His world is a hushed world--his book, a silent prayer, not to a god, but to life, the life of survivors--that one can whisper, can join the dead--that whisper turns into a ritualistic text, a celebration of witnessing, of the minute manifestations of reality. Brandon Shimoda barely touches his own words: they come to him from afar, float, take a sigh, haunt us and disappear, reappear on the next page, follow their obscure journey--in that we become bound to hear them, we follow them--they make a poem we want to read, and reread with closed eyes. Insinuating itself in the memory of Hiroshima and the bomb--a disaster surpassing disasters--his work is the saying of the dead who return, is a Requiem.--Etel Adnan\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50401228587281,"sku":"CIN1933959134G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1933959134.jpg?v=1750835908"},{"product_id":"desert-the-book-shimoda-brandon-9780998829067","title":"The Desert, the","description":"Poetry. Asian \u0026amp; Asian American Studies. Brandon Shimoda's THE DESERT, a sequel to his William Carlos Williams Award-winning book EVENING ORACLE, guides us deep into, and then back out of, a rich yet desolate North American landscape. Divided into seven sections--featuring poems, letters, diary entries, and photographs--the desert's multiplicity emerges through a ranging exploration of its Japanese American incarceration sites, homeless population, flora and fauna, violence, beauty, and how they combine to reflect this poet's contemporary view of history. Written over three years in the deserts of Arizona, the poet introduces us to the souls of the living and dead, their shadows still residing over the landscape and its mythology.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50763715674385,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50763717345553,"sku":"CIN0998829064G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51514988364049,"sku":"NGR9780998829067","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51904082772241,"sku":"CIN0998829064VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52616454635793,"sku":"NLS9780998829067","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0998829064.jpg?v=1750885311"},{"product_id":"afterlife-is-letting-go-book-brandon-shimoda-9780872869295","title":"The Afterlife is Letting Go","description":"Shortlisted for the 2026 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, Nonfiction!  Chosen one of Booklist's Top Ten History Books of the Year!  Winner of the Colorado Book Award for Creative Nonfiction  \"The Afterlife Is Letting Go is a meditative consideration of Japanese American incarceration during WWII by Brandon Shimoda, author of the PEN Open Book Award–winning The Grave on the Wall.\"—Matt Seidel, Publishers Weekly's \"Big Indie Books\"  \"Both personal and choral, The Afterlife is Letting Go is deeply felt, precise, and as generous in its insights as it is unsparing in its critiques of how 'exclusion zones' proliferate and reach across time and space. A stirring, trenchant, and necessary work.\"—Christina Sharpe, author of Ordinary Notes  In a series of reflective, multi-layered, sometimes multi-voiced essays, poet Brandon Shimoda explores the “afterlife” of the U.S. government’s forced removal and mass incarceration of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans during WWII, excavating the ways these events continue to resonate today. What emerges is a panoramic, yet intimate portrait of intergenerational trauma and healing.  Informed by personal\/familial history, years of research and travel, including visits to museums, memorials and the ruins of incarceration sites, these essays take us on both a physical and a metaphysical journey. What becomes increasingly clear are the infinite connections between the treatment of Japanese Americans and other forms of oppression, criminalization, dispossession, and state violence enacted by the United States, past, present, and ongoing.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51009004110097,"sku":"NIN9780872869295","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51215715139857,"sku":"NGR9780872869295","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51709684121873,"sku":"CIN0872869296G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51804067692817,"sku":"CIN0872869296VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52655483191569,"sku":"NLS9780872869295","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ LIKE_NEW \/ SBYB","offer_id":52891827536145,"sku":"CIN0872869296LN","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0872869296.jpg?v=1751396262"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-gb\/collections\/author-books-by-brandon-shimoda.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}