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tsunami vs. the fukushima 50: poems Paperback – March 12, 2019
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Named a “Best Book of 2019” by the New York Public Library
Finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry
Society of Midland Authors Honoree in Poetry
In March 2011, a tsunami caused by an earthquake collided with nearby power plant Fukushima Daiichi, causing the only nuclear disaster in history to rival Chernobyl in scope. Those who stayed at the plant to stabilize the reactors, willing to sacrifice their lives, became known internationally as the Fukushima 50.
In tsunami vs. the fukushima 50, Lee Ann Roripaugh takes a piercing, witty, and ferocious look into the heart of the disaster. Here we meet its survivors and victims, from a pearl-catcher to a mild-mannered father to a drove of mindless pink robots. And here, too, we meet Roripaugh’s unforgettable Tsunami: a force of nature, femme fatale, and “annihilatrix.” Tsunami is part hero and part supervillain—angry, loud, forcefully defending her rights as a living being in contemporary industrialized society. As humanity rebuilds in disaster’s wake, Tsunami continues to wreak her own havoc, battling humans’ self-appointed role as colonizer of Earth and its life-forms.
“She’s an unsubtle thief / a giver of gifts,” Roripaugh writes of Tsunami, who spits garbage from the Pacific back into now-pulverized Fukushima. As Tsunami makes visible her suffering, the wrath of nature scorned, humanity has the opportunity to reconsider the trauma they cause Earth and each other. But will they look?
- Print length120 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherMilkweed Editions
- Publication dateMarch 12, 2019
- Dimensions5.5 x 0.55 x 8.5 inches
- ISBN-101571314857
- ISBN-13978-1571314857
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Colleen Hoover comes a novel that explores life after tragedy and the enduring spirit of love. | Learn more
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"[A] visionary narrative . . . tsunami vs. the fukushima 50 excites with its rich pop culture references in service to the poignant lessons about fear and the various human responses to vulnerability." ―Rigoberto Gonzalez, On the Seawall
"A playful and inventive portrait of nature's fierce and humorous indifference toward humanity and its accessories." ―NYPL.org (Best Books of 2019)
"In Tsunami vs. the Fukushima 50, a book that crackles with imaginative language and mythological retellings that represent real-life disaster, Roripaugh offers the audience a new way to think about nuclear and natural disasters and the remnants and ghosts that remain in their wake." ―The Rumpus
"[tsunami vs. the fukushima 50] succeeds―and opens itself up . . . as a series of monster, superhero, and supervillain portraits, each a kind of allegory about how human beings respond to disaster, some based on how human beings really did respond in Japan, as well as on movies and mainstream American comics. ―Stephanie Burt, Yale Review
"[Roripaugh's] poems do not assert control over or claim to understand the natural world. Instead, they offer us a way to reckon with larger-than-life forces of nature . . . [they] resist not the supposed knowability of women, or of nature, but the attempt to render either woman or nature 'knowable.'" ―Los Angeles Review of Books
"[Roripaugh's] taken as her subject the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster―and the people who risked their lives to prevent conditions from worsening. It's a thematically rich and moving moment in history, powerfully channeled into words on a page."―Vol. 1 Brooklyn
"tsunami vs. the fukushima 50 interrogates the 2011 disaster with unswerving gaze . . . The collection gives voice to the colonized, the irradiated, the monstrous―seeking throughout to understand how language can endeavor representing immense trauma."―Frontier Poetry
"With tsunami vs. the fukushima 50, Lee Ann Roripaugh has written us poetry to infect us as we consume with a momentous voracity that [which] turns its own page."―Arkansas International
“The title of Lee Ann Roripaugh’s new book, tsunami vs. the fukushima 50, well evokes the gravely zany hijinks of these shapeshifting poems. Mothra, guilt-ridden Marvel beta-heroes, elderly pearl divers, and irradiated power plant workers orbit chaotically in the upheaval of the November 2011 tsunami―an upheaval that has never stopped happening. Female and fatal, the tsunami is mother, goddess, monster; she takes everything into her body until her body is revealed to be the whole sad, captivating world: ‘reclining in a froth of surf, / loose hair swirling around bare / shoulders, my eyes half-closed.’”―Joyelle McSweeney
“The elemental force of Lee Ann Roripaugh’s latest collection will sweep readers into the churning waters of her vibrant poetic imagination. Evoking the joint disasters of a tsunami and the resulting damage to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, ghosts and the long legacy of the atomic age address the readers in vibrant monologues and personas. The poems in turn remind us of the responsibility we each have to keenly preserve our humanity, even in the face of possible annihilation. Roripaugh’s poetry insists on our ancient struggle to find meaning and even joy in the wake of loss.”―Oliver de la Paz
“The suffering caused by the Fukushima nuclear disaster and tsunami are transformed into an essential book of poetry by Lee Ann Roripaugh. In these moving poems, Roripaugh explores the enduring spirit of those affected by the tsunami and the cruel irony in the ways this disaster echoes the suffering caused by the atomic bombs. This book haunts the reader with its intimate voices and intense unforgettable images.”―David Mura
Praise for Dandarians
“What happens when verbicide meets genocide? In Dandarians, Lee Ann Roripaugh’s brilliant fourth book, the poet’s lovely, lyrical wordplay reveals its origins in political and familial dissent. Roripaugh guides readers through dangerous territory, where clouds ‘dervish off the sagebrushed plains’ and ‘strangeness makes me a moving target.’ Here’s the clash of cultures written on the body of a daughter: ‘Prismed through the scrim of my mother’s Japanese accent, I think dandelions are Dandarians . . . when I tell you I’m an alien . . . I am, of course, mostly joking.’ Reading feels like breaking rules, rules that separate us from others: ‘Do you have a permission tree? Is it blooming?’ Believe this poet when she tells you what she knows.”―Carol Guess
“In her fourth collection, Dandarians, Lee Ann Roripaugh mobilizes the Japanese haibun to investigate the dialectic of trauma and care that gives rise to a particularly luminous poetic sensibility. There is the culture shock of the mixed-ethnicity child who inherits her Asian mother’s mispronunciation of ‘dandelions,’ transforming one invasive species into an interplanetary race of ‘Dandarians.’ (‘If you’re not careful,’ writes Roripaugh, ‘I’ll take over your garden’). There is also the trauma of abuse, of a woman forced ‘to repeat the things that were done to me that I have no names for yet.’ And yet the compound fractures of history are continuously mended by the grace of this writer’s wit―’I love the word antimacassar, though I have no use for antimacassars themselves’―and her openness to the shocks of beauty that surround us. Who else could see a caterpillar dangling from its silk thread as ‘a showgirl in the Ziegfield follies straddling a glittering sliver of moon’? Dandarians is a work of beauty and resilience: the beauty of resilience, and the resilience of beauty.”―Srikanth Reddy
“Pleasure and danger and recollected frustration, the prismatic color of the Great Plains, the allure of exoplanets and the generative powers that wait in a child’s solecisms and mispronunciations: those are only some of the ‘favorite things’ (as Coltrane did not put it) in Lee Ann Roripaugh’s best book yet, a takeup of prose poems and lyric essays at once exuberant about tomorrow, about the sexy detail all over the visible and audible world, and serious about childhood, about her family’s tough yesterdays. Here are pages to cherish simply for the way they make up words, or put words together (fish solfège!) but here, too, is the resonant voice of a newly confident author: Roripaugh’s associations, juxtapsitions, recollections, digressions take her from purple riverbanks to stark regret and back to present-day starshine: ‘I’ll take over your garden,’ the poet promises. You’d do well to let her in.”―Stephanie Burt
“I am completely in awe of and in love with Lee Ann Roripaugh’s Dandarians, of the perfection of her images, the intensity of her language, the glittering and gorgeous union of these two. I stall and stutter, a willing captive to her phrases. She writes, ‘Sun’s cold high beam glaring everywhere―ricocheting off snow, stretching sky’s dome like a taut blue balloon, sluicing in through every window.’ There is so much to say that this book is about; there is so much to say that this book does. I loved reading about Roripaugh’s linguistical mishaps, of her experiences, so akin to mine, of being a half. I loved being a Dandarian, enmeshed in Roripaugh’s Dee Asters.”―Jenny Boully
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
awoken venom
cobra come uncharmed
glittering rush
of fanged lightning
that strikes
and strikes again
tsunami has no name
call her the scalded splash
of tea jarred from
a broken cup’s cracked glaze
call her the blood-soaked shirt
and cut-away pants
pooled ruby on the floor / rising biohazard
ill-omened oil that stills
the wings of birds
she spills
and spills
and spills over
a sloshed bucket
tipped-over pitcher
the bent tin cup’s
cool sluice of rinse
poured over skin’s
delicious prickle
ginger’s cleansing sting
erasing the soft flesh of fish
from the tongue
she goes by no name
call her annihilatrix
call her tabula rasa
she’s the magic slate’s
crackling cellophane page
shellacked wings un-clung
from staticky black elytra
the liminal torn-open, turning
words into invisible birds lifting
unruly as catastrophe
yes, but / and . . .
(if only, if only--
meticulous swift precision
of disaster’s Swiss watch)
she remains unnamed
call her the meme
infecting your screen
call her the mal-ware
gone viral
radioactive man
the papers started calling me
Radioactive Man after tests from
the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency
revealed the highest radiation levels
in anyone they’d ever screened
I guess I’m the champion, I joke
to reporters who come for interviews
like visitors from another planet
bulky and brightly awkward
in white hazmat suits, they look
like mourners at a Buddhist funeral
and so I light a cigarette to dangle
from the corner of my lip and grin
even eight miles away, in Tomioka,
the sound of Reactor 4 exploding
was completely unmistakable,
so I took my elderly parents south
to my aunt in Iwaki, who refused
to even open her door to us because
she said we were contaminated
then we tried a temporary shelter
but it was full, so we came home
again to the no go zone, and when
other relatives agreed to take in
my parents, I stayed behind
to care for the abandoned animals
I’ve seen many terrible things:
cages filled with withered songbirds,
horses left to starve in their stalls,
an abandoned puppy that grew
too big for the chain around its neck
I rescue as many as I can:
the dog trapped inside a barn
for months, who survived by eating
the dead flesh of starved cattle
or the feral ostrich so vicious
the police who border patrol
the nuclear exclusion zone
armed with Geiger counters
nicknamed her The Boss
all over Tomioka, the animals
recognize the sound of my truck,
and come running to meet me
when I make my daily rounds
many come to stay with me
at my family’s old rice farm
living without water
or electricity in the ruins
of the town where I was born
is sometimes very lonely
I wait for cancer or leukemia
and joke to The Boss about
becoming a superhero through
a radioactive ostrich bite
sometimes I think of visiting
my two kids, who live
with my ex-wife in Tokyo,
but then I remind myself
of the invisible dust coated
in cesium particles that’s in
my clothes, my hair, my skin
I remember I can see my future
in the sick animals I care for
in the American Watchmen comics,
Dr. Manhattan was once tricked
into believing he’d given everyone
he ever loved cancer, through
exposure to his radioactive body
just the thought of this undid him,
made him feel so solitary and blue
he left the earth behind for eons,
to brood in exile on the moon
hungry tsunami / tsunami as galactus
the hunger of trying to hold back
the hunger a little bit longer
the hunger of restraint and pullback
churn and growl of beached fishes
in an agitated bouillabaisse
liquid silver squirming on an empty shore
to lick the gilding from the buildings
like golden drizzles of caramel
to take the cake / flick off the crumbs
to raze the fruit / spit out the pits
the hunger of sucked-out marrow
the unwillingly pried-open oyster
the cracked and pillaged lobster claw
to shuck / to husk / to unshell
her way to what’s most tender
to dismantle the protective scrims
that signal a cache of rawness
to demolish defenseless succulence
the hunger for the liquid center
squirt of ganache in a swiss truffle
chocolate lava cake’s molten fondant core
to feed past the end of greed
to feast past the end of want
to gorge past the borders of voraciousness
until she becomes the monstrous goddess
of binge / pure mercenary lack
the blooded face
blood in the water
the blood moon’s exposed sweet throat
with its lipsticked jugular bitten clean out
Product details
- Publisher : Milkweed Editions (March 12, 2019)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 120 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1571314857
- ISBN-13 : 978-1571314857
- Item Weight : 5.7 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.55 x 8.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #837,503 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #146 in Asian American Poetry
- #574 in Nature Poetry
- #2,125 in Poetry by Women
- Customer Reviews:
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonTop reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on March 5, 2020So inventive, so deep-hearted. Did not expect the turn these pieces took at the end but it only made the whole experience deeper. And these poems then give new depth to the characters/stories it builds on, as if to say, but yes, of course, these held that meaning all along. Simply stunning.
- Reviewed in the United States on April 16, 2019There are so many delightful surprises in the images and language of these poems. Beautiful and slippery, but also with the immense gravity of the two disasters. The results are powerful and complex, thrilling all the way through.
- Reviewed in the United States on September 27, 2019A collection that does exactly what poetry ought to do--it makes you feel deeply about important things while immersing you in beautiful language.
- Reviewed in the United States on June 18, 2019A wonderfully heady collection. Smart and enigmatic but completely with purpose and direction. This book is a star of 2019.
- Reviewed in the United States on December 27, 2019Such a beautiful book of poems, incredibly written I loved them!
- Reviewed in the United States on August 5, 2019What a unique, important voice here. Through persona poems and deeply reflective anthems, Roripaugh's poems humanize the toll of this natural disaster.
Some of my favorite moments:
what happens when she wakens
from this clam before the thorn?
her nervous system a glitter
of neurotransmitters on fire
a cracked moon smithereened
on the porch room floor
Top reviews from other countries
- benjamin cusdenReviewed in the United Kingdom on March 1, 2020
5.0 out of 5 stars Book of the year.
Thoroughly enjoyed these poems. Book of the year.
- LeslieGReviewed in the United Kingdom on September 12, 2020
5.0 out of 5 stars brilliant.
heartbreaking. gutting. poetic mastery