shima

Description

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. The poet says, 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.

Speaking through a cultural amnesia collected between a sunken past and a sensed, ghostly-dreamed future, shima anchors this interrogation of the relationship between father and son in the fragile connective tissue of memory where the poet’s homeland is an impossible destination.”What do you call the act of witnessing, in real time, the movement of a person in the process of liberating themselves from the ruins and the roots of the past by transforming, or being transformed, into the embodiment of an entirely new, self-flourishing ecosystem? Testifying? Empowering? Dis-empiring? Reading? I don’t know that I read Shō Yamagushiku’s shima so much as I become sensitized to and botanized by its forms of resistance and hard-won revelations. I cannot explain or express, really, what this work means to me. It is meaning, a reintegration of the future, and, in poetry, my chosen family.”
—Brandon Shimoda, author of Hydra Medusa

“This remarkable debut reads like a compressed epic, each line attuned to its place within the poem, but also to the sweep of the composition. As one page turns to the next, centuries and continents shift and families thin and thread into new communities. The poems leave fragments of history in their wake, which we collect and just as we feel them cohering into a whole, everything recedes like a dream.”
—Kaie Kellough, author of Magnetic EquatorShō Yamagushiku is an independent writer and researcher. He writes from the homelands of the Lekwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples (Victoria, BC). shima is his first poetry collection.I grasp the lone scraggly hibiscus bush. A man slips inside my body and falls into a single grain of sand. I am looking down at my grassy self in his watering eyes. Above us one bloom opens red to the plateau’s sky. My only flag, a sputtering waterfall, rises un-prospected waving and weighing on me. The man and I wear shame softly and for a moment it emulsifies. I begin to sweat. The man licks my shoulder clean. The sun has reached its apex and I am stiff, difficult as ever, pointing crooked west. I am a compass pulling across the inland sea, over the desert to the smiling city by the coast, greeting the gaping ocean, trawling, sifting for that rock of an island, as if through a searching explosion, it might be mineCA

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