Chronicle of Drifting
Staff Rec
Tanaka's poems are lucid and surreal - like "a trembling bone under cold water." Drawing on tanka and haiku, they have a precision of image and language that's often funny ("The Village of the Mermaids"), sometimes affectingly lonesome ("Afterlife," also "The Village of the Mermaids"). There's not a word misplaced in this book of wanderings - read it on a train, go to places unexpected.
- Nora
Chronicle of Drifting enacts a restless quest for belonging, interweaving dreamlike imagery and Japanese lyricism
Yuki Tanaka's stunning debut, Chronicle of Drifting, explores rootlessness, its beauty and perils. Tanaka's restless imagination roams among places and personae--a village mermaid, a geisha in the Midwest, a flâneur in Tokyo--searching for a permanent self and a sense of community. In the feverish world of these poems, inspired by the Japanese tradition of tanka and haiku, as well as by timeless surrealism, one meets a light-lashed horse, an imaginary chauffeur, an out-of-business psychic, a girl who skewers a fish with a flower stalk. In poems ranging from lyric to prose, Tanaka creates a poignant dreamlike realm where the inner and outer worlds, the self and others, merge--like the train passenger who, looking out the window and seeing the sky through his reflection, feels "empty, a blue outline."