Hiromi Ito/New from Action Books

I want to get rid of Kanoko
I want to get rid of filthy little Kanoko
I want to get rid of or kill Kanoko who bites off my nipples.


You can now buy copies of the new Action Books book, Killing Kanoko: Selected Poems of Hiromi Ito (trans. Jeffrey Angles) at our web site for the discounted price of 12 bucks (plus shipping).

Or at SPD.

This is amazing book by one of the most influential and amazing modern women poets of Japan (though she now lives in California, but that's another post).

Excerpt: "Father's Uterus, Or The Map" (from Action, Yes)

Bio:
Hiromi Ito, born in 1955 in Tokyo, is one of the most important and dynamic poets of contemporary Japan. After her sensational debut in the late 1970s, she emerged as the foremost voice of the wave of "women's poetry" that swept Japan in the 1980s. To date, she has published more than a dozen critically acclaimed collections of poetry, several novels, and numerous books of essays. She has won many important Japanese literary prizes, including the Takami Jun Prize, the Hagiwara Sakutaro Prize, and the Izumi Shikibu Prize. She now lives outside of San Diego with her partner Harold Cohen and her daughters. KILLING KONOKO: SELECTED POEMS OF HIROMI ITO is the first U.S. edition of her work.

This is what Anne Waldman said about the book:
"KILLING KANOKO is a powerful, long-overdue collection (in fine translation) of poetry from the radical Japanese feminist poet, Hiromi Ito. Her poems reverberate with sexual candor, the exigencies and delights of the paradoxically restless/rooted female body, and the visceral imagery of childbirth leap off the page as performative modal structures--fierce, witty, and vibrant. Hiromi is a true sister of the Beats."