A profound collection of poetry from Japanese poet Hirata, expounding on readership and everyday life.American readers’ awareness of contemporary Japan, through literature and poetry, has increased in recent decades, but many are still left with little means of understanding the everyday cultural phenomena that makes Japanese culture what it is. Hirata uses her poems to genuinely investigate aspects of Japanese culture in a way that makes it easy for the reader to understand, and she has an extraordinary way of breaking down a normal event, like seeing an old man riding a bicycle in a park, into a journey that elucidates something profound. Her poems gain prosody while keeping a core narrative aspect which is colored with her own dark and warm artistic lens. Every poem in Is It Poetry? helps the reader understand and think about what is to be cherished, feared, loved, and what is not.

“Even while boasting of its rapid strength and speed,� Kiriu Minashita says in the afterword to Sonic Peace, “the world is being ecstatically eroded by the violent rewriting of meaning.� Sonic Peace is a work of extreme genius and unassailable critique, fused with beauty and lightheartedness: a love story set against the backdrop of an apocalyptic Tokyo. Published in Japan in 2005, Sonic Peace won the celebrated Chuya Nakahara Prize in 2006, and solidified Minashita's status as one of the most important critical Japanese voices of her generation.