Memories of the Future

Here is a collaborative text woven of two minds, two voices, and from two sides of the Pacific. Take a pause, a breath—these poems breathe new life into the contemporary poem, with the sensibility of leap—leaving room for the reader’s imagination and foregrounding mystery in form. If not broken language, we find broken sememes, as though we live on small islands of knowing surrounded by seas of the unknown, of cosmos, and acknowledge a feeling there of atmospheres, tides, and longings… To speak to the future—as memory—is to address our trembling present by reframing all that has come before, yet these works are likewise rooted in the earth of cultural ancientness, echoing the “ever-shifting, self-effacing palimpsest” of distant voices drawing near, receding in lines that dissolve in mist. Our future, in question, is here presented in revelatory conversation.

—Dr. Richard Gilbert, Professor of English Literature at Kumamoto University, author of Poetry as Consciousness and The Disjunctive Dragonfly