In “hulk smash,” for example, each stanza begins with “because,” beginning with the ordinary “because it was afternoon / and I was at the carnation farm” and then falling into a catalog of linked horrors that can end only in an impotent act of rage and destruction against “the rusted TEPCO signs reading / Nuclear Power: Bright Future / of Energy”: “because now… / I feel such a huge surge / of adrenaline and rage, / that I have to tear it down.” Because in the end, causality always falls intentionally short in Rorpaugh’s poems. As with the many faces of the tsunami, their portraits are often displayed through the portrait of another, otherized even through the form of their witness.ĭrawing on the tsunami’s natural form as a force that builds and builds without relenting, Roripaugh sometimes engages a causal structure in her poems, trying to lay out the effects of this multiple disaster like dominoes. Under Roripaugh’s tender gaze, we see disaster as narrated by its mutations, abominations, and castaways: the invisible man in “anonymous, invisible man” who speaks “only / on condition of anonymity” then tells us “I decline to reveal / my internal radiation levels” before describing how “I got off the train, slipping / into the city’s stream… / and then I quietly disappeared ” or the child of a TEPCO worker in “white tsubame” whose newly-sprouted white swallow’s wings “grow larger / and more unwieldy, become / difficult for me to hide / underneath my hoody ” or Hisako in “hisako’s testimony (as x-men’s armor),” the orphaned “little blue-haired girl,” who, after being brutally assaulted in an alley, daydreams about her favorite X-men character, Armor, whose “armor’s smelted / from her ancestor’s ghosts // because it’s forged in memory.” The voices Roripaugh calls upon are the voices of the liminal, those at the edge, their identities hybridized by calamity, pushed out of the world until they often seem to cross over, at least partially, into the realm of science fiction or comic book.
#Miki endo your name series#
Deftly, she weaves between a prismatic series of portraits in which she examines the tsunami from a multitude of angles (“hungry tsunami,” “shapeshifter tsunami,” “beautiful tsunami,” “tsunami as misguided kwannon,” “emo tsunami,” “tsunami in love”) and persona poems that create a roiling swirl of voices, their disparate “I”s cresting and breaking, knocking helplessly against one another in the surge. In light of this, Roripaugh’s veering, multiplicitous approach quickly reveals itself as an organic one. The viewpoint is like that of a handheld camera, the uncomfortable intimacy of a close-up shot sweeping into a chaotic panoramic and back again.īecause a tsunami is by nature both consumer and consumed, the composite of all it has swept up and swallowed, it is inherently a many-voiced, many faced creature, illusive even as one attempts to plumb the depths of its rage. They cut into physicality then swerve away, inhabiting and stripping simultaneously-embodying both the pinpoint moment of impact and the echoing, dissociated ripples of destruction that emanate from it.
#Miki endo your name cracked#
“Tsunami has no name,” she writes, “she goes by no name…she remains unnamed.” And so, in lieu of a name, she instead begins by offering up to the reader, through a spillage of breathtakingly haunting images, any unsteady moniker that might serve to grasp the calamity at hand: “call her the scalded splash / of tea jarred from / a broken cup’s cracked glaze,” she suggests, “call her the blood-soaked shirt / and cutaway pants / pooled ruby on the floor” or “ginger’s cleansing sting / erasing the soft flesh of fish / from the tongue” or “the meme / infecting your screen.” Her images are at once gentle and violent. To write of tsunami is to attempt to speak the unspeakable and thus to arrive always at “the liminal torn-open, turning / words into invisible birds lifting / unruly as catastrophe…”įrom the book’s very first poem, “ontology of tsunami,” Roripaugh makes plain the unfeasibility of her task. Triggered by the magnitude 9 undersea Great Tōhoku Earthquake, the tsunami claimed over 15,000 lives, caused level-7 meltdowns at three reactors in the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant complex, and displaced roughly a quarter of a million people from their homes. the Fukushima 50, which takes as its subject the devastating tsunami that struck the eastern coast of Japan on March 11, 2011.
And this challenge of de-scription-the impossibility of writing an experience so terrible it defies the written word-deeply informs Lee Ann Roripaugh’s fifth collection of poems, Tsunami vs. This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes,” Maurice Blanchot wrote in his 1980 L’Ecriture du désastre ( The Writing of the Disaster). “The disaster… is what escapes the very possibility of experience-it is the limit of writing.
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