Description:
Michelle Naka Pierce's MAMA documents a nonagenarian mother in cognitive decline. With wartime memories on continuous loop, the text leans into the Zuihitsu tradition of following the brush, stitching together letter, evocation, and grief.
Brief description: Michelle Naka Pierce is the author of eleven titles, including Continuous Frieze Bordering Red, awarded Fordham University's Poets Out Loud Editor's Prize, as well as Quarter Light, a celebration of friendship in the equinox/solstice season. Born in Japan and raised in the US, her poetry and hybrid texts often embody the complexity of "border identity." Pierce teaches in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University and lives in Colorado with poet Chris Pusateri and Shigin Sensei Michiko Masuda Pierce. Her recent work MAMA, a poem thirty years in the making, honors her mother's resilience and survival of the war.