Killing Kanoko: Selected Poems
by Hiromi Itō

Translated by Jeffrey Angles.

Poetry. East Asian Studies. Japan Studies.
ISBN: 9780979975547
1 December 2009
$16

I want to get rid of Kanoko
I want to get rid of filthy little Kanoko
I want to get rid of or kill Kanoko who bites off my nipples.

“Killing Kanoko is a powerful, long-overdue collection (in fine translation) of poetry from the radical Japanese feminist poet, Hiromi Itō. Her poems reverberate with sexual candor, the exigencies anddelights of the paradoxically restless/rooted female body, and the visceral imagery of childbirth leap off the page as performative modal structures–fierce, witty, and vibrant. Hiromi is a true sister of the Beats.”

– Anne Waldman

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hiromi Itō, born in 1955 in Tokyo, is one of the most important and highly regarded poets in Japan. Since her sensational debut in the late 1970s as a free-spirited and intelligent female poet with shamanisitic qualities, Ito has published more than 10 collections of poetry including such monumental works as Oume (Green Plums, 1982), Watashi wa Anjuhimeko de aru (I am Anjyuhimeko, 1993), and Kawara Arekusa (Wild Grass upon a Riverbank, 2005) which won the prestigious Takami Jun Award.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

Dr. Jeffrey Angles is an associate professor and advisor of Japanese in the Department of World Languages and Literatures at Western Michigan University. Angles’ lifelong interest in Japan and Japanese literature began when he went to southwestern Japan as a 15-year-old exchange student. Since then he has gone to Japan multiple times, spending many years working and studying in various cities including Saitama City, Kobe and Kyoto. Much of his critical work has focused on expressions of ideology within 20th century and 21st century literature and film from Japan, especially of the modernist era. His study of representations of same-sex desire in the literature of the interwar period was published in 2011.