We Face the Tremendous Meat on the Teppan

• We Face the Tremendous Meat on the Teppan
• Price: $12.00
• 978-1-949540-35-2
• November 15, 2022
• Poetry - PB
• Pages - 40
• Naoko Fujimoto

MEET THE AUTHOR

We asked Naoko Fujimoto two questions. Why did you write We Face The Tremendous Meat On The Teppan and why do you write poetry?

“I wrote We Face The Tremendous Meat On The Teppan because war scars generations and the soil.”–Naoko Fujimoto

“I write poetry because it is important to talk, despite my hesitation.”–Naoko Fujimoto

AWARDS

C&R Press Winter Soup Bowl 2021 Chapbook Selection

We Face The Tremendous Meat On The Teppan is also available as an eBook!

ABOUT

This poetry collection is a text collage about inter-generational war trauma: how my Japanese family lived through it and how we coped. This story was built from my two grandmothers’ war experiences; though, the main characters are a woman narrator and her grandmother. They are celebrating Grandmother’s birthday at a teppan-yaki restaurant (Japanese barbecue) and the story shifts between the present and World War II.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“We Face the Tremendous Meat on the Teppan is a powerful immersive collage of family bonds and intergenerational trauma. It engages in a cinematic and moving time travel, where we are simultaneously in a burning castle and the castle restored, surviving war and speaking to Alexa, and the speaker and her grandmother are  both apart and united across time. This long poem of ‘Firecrackers scatter inside aluminum pots,’ ‘carbonated moons’ and ‘parchment fingers’ is masterful in its language and its interrogation of time, trauma, ancestors and what it means to be a descendant. It beautifully and horrifyingly inhabits the rich complexity of the equation: “she is here, so I am here.”
–Ananda Lima, author of Mother/land