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Shima is a book of poetry by Sho Yamagushiku.

What I liked:

• One of my favorite parts of reading poetry, especially poetry by poets of color, is the sense that I’m catching a glimpse of how they experience the world through their words. (The poet Chen Chen is exceedingly good at this – he brings to the forefront things that I also constantly notice, but didn’t really notice I noticed until he said it, which is one of my favorite feelings ever.) I got this same feeling from Yamagushiku’s work, though I also think we experience the world very differently – not in a bad way, but in a this-nikkei-experience-is-very-different-from-my-nikkei-experience kind of way. On a related note, I’m not sure how Yamagushiku would identify relative to any ‘nikkei’ experience – my Okinawan/Uchinaanchu diaspora friends also identify as Japanese, nikkei, Japanese American, etc., but I recognize this will not necessarily be the case for everyone in this group.
• I really enjoyed the cover of Shima. I feel there are so many possible interpretations to the seemingly simple image – three figures carrying what appears to be a boat, for anyone who is not familiar with the cover – and it’s interesting to consider how each interpretation might tie in to a different aspect of Yamagushiku’s poems.
• I’m still not entirely sure of the meaning of the phrase ‘contains multitudes’ but I feel that my own current understanding of this phrase was embodied in this book, particularly in how Yamagushiku appears to embrace expansive, fluid, but also at times pointedly specific (and also pointed) understandings of (Okinawan? Uchinaanchu? Japanese? Nikkei?) identity.

What I learned:

• I hope a nikkei scholar writes an analysis of Yamagushiku’s work in relation to contemporary works by other nikkei poets. I don’t know what the findings would be, but that’s why I hope someone writes one.

Questions I had:

• What is Yamagushiku working on next? What are his main objectives as a poet? What does he hope readers will experience through his work?

Follow-up:

• I’ll have to check if Yamagushiku has written any essays or articles along the lines of the content of Shima – I’d like to know how his longform writing reads.