Formally audacious and remarkably compelling, Yi Sang’s works were uniquely situated amid the literary experiments of world literature in the early twentieth century and the political upheaval of 1930s Japanese occupied Korea. While his life ended prematurely at the age of twenty-seven, Yi Sang’s work endures as one of the great revolutionary legacies of modern Korean literature. Presenting the work of the influential Korean modernist master, this carefully curated selection assembles poems, essays, and stories that ricochet off convention in a visionary and daring response to personal and national trauma, reminding us that to write from the avant-garde is a form of civil disobedience.

A poem in conversation with literature and written during a durational performance.   Written in loose sonata form, Pink Waves is a poem of radiant elegy and quiet protest. Moving through the shifting surfaces of inarticulable loss, and along the edges of darkness and sadness, Pink Waves was completed in the presence of audience members over the course of a three-day durational performance. Sawako Nakayasu accrues lines written in conversation with Waveform by Amber DiPietro and Denise Leto, and micro-translations of syntax in the Black Dada Reader by Adam Pendleton, itself drawn from Ron Silliman’s Ketjak. Pink Waves holds an amalgamation of texts, constructing a shimmering haunting of tenderness, hunger, and detritus.  

Nakayasu's book-length poem uses its tumbling dramatic form to create a new inquiry into "character," "time," "place," "direction " and other elements. Lyrical language and personal, engaging voices take the reader on a dizzying and affecting journey through a "geography of risk." This wholly original work brings poetry into regions hitherto explored only by the most experimental forms of music and plastic arts.

Sawako Nakayasu was born in Yokohama, Japan, and has lived in the US since the age of six. Her previous pubications include "Clutch "(Tinfish, 2002), "Balconic "(Duration, 2003), and "Nothing fictional but accuracy or arrangement (she " (Faux, 2003), and she edits the press Factorial. In 2003 she received the US-Japan Creative Artists' Program Fellowship from the NEA.

In Sawako Nakayasu’s first poetry collection in seven years, an unsettling diaspora of “girls� is deployed as poetic form, as reclamation of diminutive pseudo-slur, and as characters that take up residence between the thick border zones of language, culture, and shifting identity. Written in response to Nakayasu’s 2017 return to the US, this maximalist collection invites us to reexamine our own complicity in reinforcing literary convention. The book radicalizes notions of “translation� as both process and product, running a kind of linguistic interference that is intimate, feminist, and playfully jagged.