These poems are brought together by a shared voice, beautifully clear, strikingly individual.
The third, “After A Lifetime of Saving the World” finally, summoning all the loss considered in the previous two sequences, puts itself forward as a poem of love and domesticity, of refuge, and of the problems and struggles even refuge has: More than this though, it sings about the way that, from this point of abandonment, the speaker has been able, no dust settling on her soul, to make herself more than this simple story of hurt, even though the thing she has made of herself continues to be scorned: The second, “A Song of Someplace Yet to Fall” begins by addressing itself to a different kind of loss, of cis friends and family, unable to deal with the speaker’s transness. It measures the loss of life that day is meant to commemorate, but it also asks: what is lost in understanding ourselves, in allowing ourselves to be understood, in terms of loss? The first sequence, “The Woman of Water Dreams ” addresses itself satirically and sadly to the phenomenon of the Transgender Day of Remembrance. The three new sequences share a broad topic: the losses trans people make themselves out of, or rather the losses one particular trans woman makes herself out of. Whilst it is wonderful to have Sometimes Too Hot… and “No More Hiroshimas” more readily accessible than they have been, it is the new work that chiefly makes this book important. It collects her 2010 chapbook sequence about Los Angeles, Sometimes Too Hot The Eye Of Heaven Shines, and an older long poem, “No More Hiroshimas,” together with three new poetic sequences. ‘Why Dust Shall Never Settle Upon This Soul’ by Ryka Aokiįollowing up her 2014 novel, He Mele A Hilo, Why Dust Shall Never Settle Upon This Soul is Ryka Aoki’s first book dedicated completely to poetry.
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