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Christine Kitano's second poetry collection elicits a sense of hunger—an intense longing for home and an ache for human connection. Channeling both real and imagined immigration experiences of her own family—her grandmothers, who fled Korea and Japan; and her father, a Japanese American who was incarcerated during WWII—Kitano's ambitious poetry speaks for those who have been historically silenced and displaced.
Christine Kitano's first collection of poetry, Birds of Paradise, was published by Lynx House Press. She lives in Ithaca, NY, where she is an assistant professor of creative writing, poetry, and Asian American literature at Ithaca College.
"The poems in Sky Country sound far from home, stricken with homesickness, and saturated with longing. While they include both personal and collective history, they're spoken in the voice of someone strangely alienated from the former and unaccounted for and excluded from the latter. Beautiful and moving." —Li-Young Lee
"Christine Kitano writes with clarity and honesty about displacement, deracination, and cultural identity. Her poems in this book convey the dignity of the immigrant in America, the 'sky country' of the title. In one of the most moving of them, ‘A Story with No Moral,’ we can see that indeed there is moral depth to all that she writes. She expresses that depth when she affirms, in 'Autobiography of the Poet at Sixteen,' 'we are built for life, / for love, which means / we are built for pain.' These poems are testimonies of survival and we need their witness as much as ever." —Mark Jarman, author of The Heronry
"The poems in Sky Country weave, unravel, and stitch together history and time with such a fierce originality that the images buzz in the mind. Lyrically vibrant and sonically alive, Kitano’s gorgeous poems remind us that we are always linked to immigration, to the women that raised us, and it's through our own language that we do the honoring." —Ada Limón
A Leaving … 1
I
Sky Country … 3
II
Gaman … 11
February, 1943 … 12
Equinox … 13
I Will Explain Hope … 14
Fireflies … 15
About the Trees … 16
III
Leaving California … 19
Before the Divorce, a Dry Thunderstorm … 20
Ancestors … 21
Lucky Come Hawai‘i … 22
Summer: Insomniac Stages Her Love … 23
Monologue of the Dental Assistant … 24
Insomniac in Winter … 26
Monologue of the Fat Girl … 27
Insomniac in Spring … 29
Choose Your Own Adventure: Go South … 30
Insomniac in Fall … 31
Worship … 32
Insomniac Starts an Exercise Routine … 33
IV
Years Later, Washing Dishes, A Vision … 35
The Night Before Your 28th Birthday … 36
Roofing … 37
Bring in the Flowers Before the Santa Anas … 38
Autobiography of the Poet at Sixteen … 39
A Story With No Moral … 41
Friday Night Affair … 46
V
1942: In Response to Executive Order 9066 … 48
Grandmother Tells Me a Story: Passing the Lake, Korea, 1952 … 49
Chicken Soup … 50
Persimmons … 52
Earthquake Drills … 53
For the Korean Grandmother on Sunset Boulevard … 54