Love hotels, cups of coffee, street angels, seaweed, stray men, record players, cigarettes….
This is poetry for people who like to roam around at night in neon cities. Or in unfamiliar bedrooms. Or in gradually ascending dimensions of the astral plane.
Where will these wanderings take you? To Shinjuku? To enlightenment? It’s different depending on the night.
The 41 poems in this collection bounce deftly between themes of sex and solitude and rejoice in the chaotic beauty of each.
Waller, hailed as a young neo-Beat writer emerging from Japan’s ex-pat English poetry community, offers her words with a starry-eyed detachment and a hunger for the pauses between meaning.
The critics respond…
Grounded in the unfiltered imagery of sex, addiction, and memories that perpetually haunt, the 41 poems in Waller’s debut collection demonstrate her ability to not only gaze into the abyss, but have a conversation with it.”
—Metropolis Magazine (read full review)
Waller’s poems feel like a key to a secret Tokyo club, that one underground you always suspect exists, but are not allowed to go in.”
—Tokyo Weekender (read full review)
This is poetry that expertly shares the Beat impulse. Sexy as Kazuko Shiraishi & euphoric as Ken Kesey. Yet these poems are stripped to the bone—directly expressed.”
—Taylor Mignon, Outreach Editor of RHINO: The Poetry Forum
Something pure and fragile in the midst of grimly damagingly real unyielding circumstances… These poems have an Icarus hubris and an ethereal eroticism about them.”
—Duncan Whom, delicate delinquent and queer art cabaret chameleon
