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Done Being Nurtured by Natsumi Aoyagi, translated by Corey Wakeling

Spite Press

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Done Being Nurtured by Natsumi Aoyagi, translated by Corey Wakeling

For Japanese poet Natsumi Aoyagi, language promises a more lucid, living documentation of experience. Done Being Nurtured, her debut appearance in English translation, explores the birth of insight in childhood and its resonance in adulthood through evanescent encounters with difference and nonhuman life.

A butterfly’s transition, a chance meeting with a childhood friend, the timeline of a cicada’s life—these apparently small events punctuate existence with mystery, highlighting rhythms for being in the world that resist the narratives we are taught about who we are. Aoyagi’s first full-length work in English signals a worldview concerned with a life’s struggle for greater connection.

Translator-poet Corey Wakeling has worked carefully with Aoyagi over the course of years to find the language needed to render her award-winning collection in English. Aoyagi’s is for a poetry we want for our future.

"The title of Natsumi Aoyagi's Done Being Nurtured suggests an assertive casting off of a particular relational identity, that of the nurtured one. In fact, this book plunges us back into what is most challenging about the experience of being a child, and of our identifications with and imaginings of nonhuman (especially insect) life. These poems begin with the conjoined understandings that 'humans can't indicate in words what cicadas are' and that, when recollecting our younger selves, 'no child figure really comes to mind'. They produce almost as a byproduct of these convictions a poetry which is glossy, inflatable, weightless, untethered; but which in its unreality actually allows us to experience what William James called the 'rich thicket of reality'. 'Melon Soda Nest', 'Keyhole Loaches', 'Radiation Dodgeball' are the names of some poems, even the titles of which produce this strange, enchanting double-effect. This is an extraordinary book which introduces a whole new set of textures into poetry."

— Oli Hazzard (Author of Sleepers Awake)

"Spite Press's new publication of Natsumi Aoyagi's groundbreaking collection Done Being Nurtured should excite all poetry lovers! She is a force to be reckoned with, and Corey Wakeling has amply done her work justice in his translation."

— Ginny Tapley Takemori (Translator of Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman)

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