PINK WAVES

Poetry. Omnidawn, 2021. Paperback, 90 pages. 6" x 9"

From NMB: We love Nakayasu’s pared-back form, which nevertheless makes radical moves—such as a special sequence where lines sprawl across the gutter, forming a two-page spread (!!!). Pink Waves builds on a history of American experimental traditions including Language Poetry, Conceptual Art, the Black Arts Movement, and Nakayasu’s own experimental translation practices. We love its quiet elegy and multitude of voices. This would be a wonderful book for teaching writing (even to yourself!).

From the press: A poem in conversation with literature and written during a durational performance.

Written in loose sonata form, Pink Waves is a poem of radiant elegy and quiet protest. Moving through the shifting surfaces of inarticulable loss, and along the edges of darkness and sadness, Pink Waves was completed in the presence of audience members over the course of a three-day durational performance. Sawako Nakayasu accrues lines written in conversation with Waveform by Amber DiPietro and Denise Leto, and micro-translations of syntax in the Black Dada Reader by Adam Pendleton, itself drawn from Ron Silliman’s Ketjak. Pink Waves holds an amalgamation of texts, constructing a shimmering haunting of tenderness, hunger, and detritus.