Done Being Nurtured by Natsumi Aoyagi, translated by Corey Wakeling
Spite Press
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 death, 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.
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