Brynn Saito takes her readers on a journey with her father to the desert prison at Gila River where, over 80 years ago, her grandparents met and made a life together. Born of an unquenchable desire to animate the shadow archive, Saito's poetry sings a song of rage, confusion, and, ultimately, love; descendants of wartime incarceration exchange dreams, mothers become water goddesses, and a modern daughter haunts future ruins. Mystical inclinations, yellow cedars, and sisterhood make a balm for trauma's scars. This work opens a dialogue between the past and present, radical ancestor and future child, desert prison and family garden.

About the Author
Brynn Saito is the author of Power Made Us Swoon (2016) and The Palace of Contemplating Departure (2013), winner of the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award and a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. She has received grant support from Densho, Hedgebrook, and the Santa Fe Arts Institute. Her poems have appeared in the New York Times and American Poetry Review and she was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and the Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award. Brynn lives in the traditional homelands of the Yokuts and Mono peoples (also known as Fresno, CA), where she is an Assistant Professor at California State University, Fresno and co-director of Yonsei Memory Project. Currently, Brynn is co-editing with Brandon Shimoda an anthology of poetry written by descendants of the Japanese American incarceration, forthcoming in 2025 from Haymarket Books. Her third book of poetry, Under a Future Sky, will be published by Red Hen in August 2023. Brynn holds degrees from Sarah Lawrence College (MFA, creative writing), New York University (MA, religious studies), and UC Berkeley (BA, philosophy).

Reviews

"Brynn Saito writes with a rare, inimitable grace in her most personal and politically engaged book to date. The epistolary poems for family and the impact of internment and inheritance are imagined with music and wisdom. I feel more alive after these poems and her reminder, 'Beautiful prayer animal, rise to the occasion of your living.' Under a Future Sky is a masterpiece."-Lee Herrick, author of Scar and Flower

The stark beauty and physicality of the Arizona desert, where Saito's paternal grandparents were imprisoned during World War II, are ever-present in her latest book. Using the framework of letters to and from her father and other family members, she honors the "riverstream of ancestors" and, in a celebration of ghosts, recovers stones for the living. Saito's fearless entry into her "gate of memory" is a radical guide for us all to make meaning from the past.-Amy Uyematsu, author of Basic Vocabulary

"Through gorgeous epistles to family, friends, and even a dragonfly, Brynn Saito quests through the Western landscape and questions the past. She searches the animal of the body, each cell an intergenerational archive, and finds 'who you've been can no longer carry you. / That is the miracle.' Lyrically lush and deeply wise, this book is both an intimate portrait and a summoning, a chance to hunt memory and recover history, still burning, still stone."-Traci Brimhall, author of Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod

Book Information
ISBN 9781636281070
Author Brynn Saito
Format Hardback
Page Count 112
Imprint Red Hen Press
Publisher Red Hen Press