New this week from Action Books, another important and blood-baked translation, a sublime meld of grotesque and giddy, which takes its mistakably blunt (and therefore, reversely compelling, and then compelling) title in reference to the author’s actual daughter, Kanoko:

Killing Kanoko
by Hiromi Ito (translated by Jeffrey Angles)
$12

I want to get rid of Kanoko
I want to get rid of filthy little Kanoko
I want to get rid of or kill Kanoko who bites off my nipples.

“KILLING KANOKO is a powerful, long-overdue collection (in finetranslation) of poetry from the radical Japanese feminist poet, HiromiIto. Her poems reverberate with sexual candor, the exigencies anddelights of the paradoxically restless/rooted female body, and the visceral imagery of childbirth leap off the page as performative modal structures–fierce, witty, and vibrant. Hiromi is a true sister of the Beats.”

-Anne Waldman

Some poems:

“Father’s Uterus, Or The Map” on Action Yes.

“Harakiri” on Nerve.

Once again, Action Books delivers a much needed translation of a major foreign poet, getting these English versions into our bodies.

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