Contemporary Japanese American and Mexican American Poets: Lyrical Solidarity

Contemporary Japanese American and Mexican American Poets examines how contemporary Japanese American and Mexican American poets imagine their past, present and future through shared aesthetics. Their poems explore topics surrounding immigration, internment, and racialization, as part of understanding intertwining strategies of exclusion both communities have faced. Their poetry forms new counternarratives that simultaneously critique the injustices of the past and leave room for imagining radically new futures free from those injustices. The authors argue that the similarity between Japanese American poetry and Mexican American poetry is evidence of an implied lyrical solidarity: poetic manifestations of an interminority awareness of unexpectedly shared histories and of the imaginative possibilities of thinking through and past them. This lyrical solidarity is traced from origins of Asian American and Latinx movements in the 1960s and 1970s and move up to the present moment to pinpoint some commonalities of poetic expression in the work of major poets, ranging from foundational luminaries such as Rodolfo ＂Corky＂ Gonzales, Toyo Suyemoto, Juan Felipe Herrera, and Lawson Fusao Inada to more contemporary figures such as Ariana Brown, Kimiko Hahn, Ana Castillo, and David Mura. This book is for scholars, researchers, and postgraduates in lyric poetry, comparative literature as well as ethnic studies and diasporic studies.

John Burns is Associate Professor of Spanish at Bard College. His first monograph, Contemporary Hispanic Poets: Cultural Production in the Global, Digital Age, took a cultural studies approach to contemporary poetry.

Toshiaki Komura is Professor of English at Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo. His first monograph, Lost Loss in American Elegiac Poetry: Tracking Inaccessible Grief from Stevens to Post 9/11, examined a difficult to articulate sense of loss and dispossession in modern and contemporary U.S. elegiac poetry through neo-formalist textual analysis, psychoanalytic approaches, and genre history.