shō yamagushiku is a diasporic Okinawan poet living in the homelands of the Lekwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples (Victoria, BC). In an interview with Nevada Alde published 28 March 2025 in the online Victoria Buzz, he identifies as a fourth-generation Japanese Canadian writer and researcher.
Poetry
shima: poems
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2024.
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
shima is a mosaic of the emotional, psychic, and generational toll that exile from a pillaged culture impresses on a poet and his community. Come to haunt yamagushiku’s practice of ancestor veneration are photographs and a narrative that spans his own life and a mythic parallel filled with a voice as spare as it is present, yearning as it is precise. The poet says, I am taking the sharpest stick and poking the root ancestor. I am insisting that if he awakens I will have something useful to say.
Speaking through a cultural amnesia collected between a sunken past and a sensed, ghostly-dreamed future, shima anchors this interrogation of the relationship between father and son in the fragile connective tissue of memory where the poet’s homeland is an impossible destination.
Links
Publisher McClelland & Stewart, an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada