Winnipeg Public Library Catalogue

"A vivid, expansive vision of intergenerational witness and repair. The village is tilting on its axis. It is turning. All its organs are spilling into the bay. Shima is a mosaic of the emotional, psychic, and generational toll that exile from a pillaged culture impresses on a poet and his community. Come to haunt Yamagushiku's practice of ancestor veneration are photographs and a narrative that spans his own life and a mythic parallel filled with a voice as spare as it is present, yearning as it is precise. Speaking through a cultural amnesia collected between a sunken past and a sensed, ghostly-dreamed future, Shima anchors the poet's interrogation of the relationship between father and son in the fragile connective tissue of memory where the poet's homeland is an impossible destination. I am taking the sharpest stick and poking the root ancestor. I am insisting that if he awakens I will have something useful to say."-- Provided by publisher..