To learn more about Book Spotlight, read this.

The Palace of Contemplating Departure is a collection of poems both strikingly personal and quietly universal.

What I liked:

• I did not know much about Brynn Saito prior to reading this book and I still do not, but I enjoyed her poems and I am glad to know she is among the nikkei poets living and working today.
• The cover art (by Liang Wei, per the back cover of the paperback edition) is lovely and is one of the reasons I decided to buy this book on the spur of the moment. I was not sure if the empty boat indicated a journey about to begin, a journey ended, a journey cut short, or something else entirely, but I was fascinated by the potential myriad of meanings behind this image and bought the book thinking the poems inside must surely measure up. On a side note, who selects the cover art for poetry books? What are the qualities of a “good” cover for a book of poetry?
• Saito’s poems are conceptually fluid, one moment seeming to reflect on personal relationships, the next becoming a commentary on national and global inequities. Although I am still working out my own relationship to poetry, Saito’s poems exemplify one of the qualities I most admire in poets – the ability to meaningfully address a wide range of topics in very few words. When I was a student, I remember thinking it seemed unfair for professors writing history books to receive the same length sabbatical as professors writing a book of poetry, but I am beginning to understand why a poet would need every bit of this time.

What I learned:

• Saito is among the more socially engaged of the nikkei writers I have read. Her involvement with the Yonsei Memory Project is especially interesting and I am looking forward to learning more about it.

Questions I had:

• Is Saito religious, or are the religious references in her poems present for some other reason?
• Saito chronicles police brutality and writes of, “my country.” From the context and her naming of specific cities, I assume the country in question is the US, but in what sense does Saito utilize the word “my?” Saito’s biography indicates she is Korean and Japanese. Does she think of Korea or Japan as being “my country” in any form, or is “country” a metaphor for something else? How does Saito conceptualize the connection(s) between being nikkei and “American-ness?”
• Saito references Nagasaki, in what appears to be an acknowledgment of the bomb, though I am not sure why. Also, is there any connection between Saito’s many religious references and Nagasaki’s history with religious foreigners?
• How might we (nikkei readers) understand Saito’s poems on JA incarceration relative to other nikkei writers’ approaches? How does Saito envision her own work relative to existing nikkei literature? What does Saito see as the future of nikkei literature?

Follow-up:

• Eventually, I would like to read Saito’s other book, Power Made Us Swoon.