that blue trickster time
by Amy Uyematsu
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Amy Uyematsu’s final collection, That Blue Trickster Time, is a powerful affirmation of Asian Americans during a global pandemic in which anti-Asian racism is at an all-time high. She revisits her family’s history during the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans. Her book is also a salute to older women – as mothers and warriors, rebels and ancient goddesses. While addressing serious social and political issues, Uyematsu’s poems are also rooted in a deep reverence for nature and a spiritual growth that comes with aging. The anger of her youthful protest days is still there, but here she can affirm this world of conflict and beauty as she speaks to the radiance of the ordinary, whether her love of stones and pine trees or her fascination with numbers and folk art. These are ferocious poems which celebrate being an older woman of color.
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Praise for That Blue Trickster Time
Amy Uyematsu has been an important voice in Asian-American poetry for the past thirty years. Her newest book, That Blue Trickster Time, distinguishes itself not only in its formal choices—Uyematsu has long been something of a formalist—but also in its depth and increasing seriousness. Time and aging have taken their toll, as more than one poem in this volume attests. The hopeful idealism of her youth has been replaced by a weathered realism. Yet she continues to celebrate the people and movements that have made her life as woman and poet possible.
Lee Rossi (full review at Rhinopoetry.org)
That Blue Trickster Time sings with the fierce, immense intelligence of water and the ancestral wisdom of the pine. Anchored in the energy of strong women and goddess muses, Amy Uyematsu’s latest collection revisits her family's experience of the Japanese American incarceration, while also focusing our gaze on the present “unceasing drone / of America’s long winter rain.” Racist violence, pandemic anxiety, and memories of a long life in political activism are distilled into poignant tanka and haiku. And, in the face of ongoing terror and history’s ghosts, these poems dance. They zumba, swing, and trickster their way into a future blooming with “clouds and stones and mothers and birds.” I was moved to my core by this book; I’m in awe of the twin energies of joyful surrender and breathless, urgent questioning that flow through these marvelous pages. Amy Uyematsu is a living legend, a poet-goddess-warrior whose searing, heart-expanding poetry will always—always—light the way.
Brynn Saito, author of Power Made Us Swoon (2016) and The Palace of Contemplating Departure (2013)
What will survive of us is love,” Philip Larkin once said. Love, and a hunger for beauty, and a lifelong thirst for justice breathe through every poem in Amy Uyematsu’s sixth book, That Blue Trickster Time. The traveler has come home at last, full into the wisdom of a woman of a certain age. This book is her place of awakening, her calling-in of sisters, her gathering of stones. Uyematsu’s vision is so wide that it takes in the tenderness and ache of the world itself; yet also so close and reverent, we hold one red-veined flower in our hands with her. In her words, the ancestors draw near as never before. She is a poet who knows that just beyond words is wordlessness. These poems open silence.
Marsha de la O, author of Every Ravening Thing (2019) and Antidote for Night (2015)
In That Blue Trickster Time, Amy Uyematsu puts it all on the line, powerfully giving voice to the great matters of life and death as she’s lived them, while never ignoring the sacred “radiance of the ordinary,” the nuanced beauty she finds, rooted in her unstinting commitment to truth. Her many loves of this world, her losses and joys, the pain of racism and her life-long opposition to the human cost of its injustice, her full embrace of her family heritage; these are poems that come from a place of deep listening, clear seeing. And, through it all, Uyematsu never fails to find the grace of life itself with what she generously calls “our wide shining eyes.” With the poet's talented, compassionate and discerning touch, these poems may well out trick the trickster with a kiss that lasts forever.
Peter Levitt, author of Within Within (2008) and Fingerpainting on the Moon (2003)
Amy Uyematsu’s newest collection affirms Asian American identity in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching back into her own family’s experience of incarceration during World War II and lifting up strong female elders from across time. If you enjoyed her poems “Thriftstore Haiku” in Issue 5 or “The Bachi-Bachi Buddhahead Blues” in Issue 7.2, be sure to put this collection down on your reading list for the spring.
lanternreview.com
Amy Uyematsu has been an important voice in Asian-American poetry for the past thirty years. Her newest book, That Blue Trickster Time, distinguishes itself not only in its formal choices—Uyematsu has long been something of a formalist—but also in its depth and increasing seriousness. Time and aging have taken their toll, as more than one poem in this volume attests. The hopeful idealism of her youth has been replaced by a weathered realism. Yet she continues to celebrate the people and movements that have made her life as woman and poet possible.
Lee Rossi (full review at Rhinopoetry.org)
That Blue Trickster Time sings with the fierce, immense intelligence of water and the ancestral wisdom of the pine. Anchored in the energy of strong women and goddess muses, Amy Uyematsu’s latest collection revisits her family's experience of the Japanese American incarceration, while also focusing our gaze on the present “unceasing drone / of America’s long winter rain.” Racist violence, pandemic anxiety, and memories of a long life in political activism are distilled into poignant tanka and haiku. And, in the face of ongoing terror and history’s ghosts, these poems dance. They zumba, swing, and trickster their way into a future blooming with “clouds and stones and mothers and birds.” I was moved to my core by this book; I’m in awe of the twin energies of joyful surrender and breathless, urgent questioning that flow through these marvelous pages. Amy Uyematsu is a living legend, a poet-goddess-warrior whose searing, heart-expanding poetry will always—always—light the way.
Brynn Saito, author of Power Made Us Swoon (2016) and The Palace of Contemplating Departure (2013)
What will survive of us is love,” Philip Larkin once said. Love, and a hunger for beauty, and a lifelong thirst for justice breathe through every poem in Amy Uyematsu’s sixth book, That Blue Trickster Time. The traveler has come home at last, full into the wisdom of a woman of a certain age. This book is her place of awakening, her calling-in of sisters, her gathering of stones. Uyematsu’s vision is so wide that it takes in the tenderness and ache of the world itself; yet also so close and reverent, we hold one red-veined flower in our hands with her. In her words, the ancestors draw near as never before. She is a poet who knows that just beyond words is wordlessness. These poems open silence.
Marsha de la O, author of Every Ravening Thing (2019) and Antidote for Night (2015)
In That Blue Trickster Time, Amy Uyematsu puts it all on the line, powerfully giving voice to the great matters of life and death as she’s lived them, while never ignoring the sacred “radiance of the ordinary,” the nuanced beauty she finds, rooted in her unstinting commitment to truth. Her many loves of this world, her losses and joys, the pain of racism and her life-long opposition to the human cost of its injustice, her full embrace of her family heritage; these are poems that come from a place of deep listening, clear seeing. And, through it all, Uyematsu never fails to find the grace of life itself with what she generously calls “our wide shining eyes.” With the poet's talented, compassionate and discerning touch, these poems may well out trick the trickster with a kiss that lasts forever.
Peter Levitt, author of Within Within (2008) and Fingerpainting on the Moon (2003)
Amy Uyematsu’s newest collection affirms Asian American identity in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching back into her own family’s experience of incarceration during World War II and lifting up strong female elders from across time. If you enjoyed her poems “Thriftstore Haiku” in Issue 5 or “The Bachi-Bachi Buddhahead Blues” in Issue 7.2, be sure to put this collection down on your reading list for the spring.
lanternreview.com
Cover art and logo by GRONK
Copyright 2009-2012 What Books Press. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright 2009-2012 What Books Press. All Rights Reserved.
