Poetry and Experimental Writing
Most books on this page are sold by imcbook. IMC is located in Tokyo. Most are also available from Amazon.com or other sources. Prices quoted are in US$ or Japanese Yen unless otherwise indicated. Prices do not include any applicable tax or shipping charges. All books are paperback unless otherwise indicated.  Also see education/teaching, novels, stories, non-fiction
 

100 Aspects of the Moon
100 Aspects of the Moon by Leza Lowitz
$15.00, 2005, 119pp, paperback, 140x214mm, 0-935086-36-6
Among the many memorable lines in this elegant, passionate book are these: "this is what transformation looks like--the mess of it, the tapping at the walls of your life." One Hundred Aspects of the Moon tends to center in the perception of a crossing, a sudden awareness that some monumental change has come upon the self. Yet the book is anything but nostalgic: everything in it struggles to accept change--or at least to see it with renewed clarity. more
ahadada reader 1
ahadada reader 1 edited by Jesse Glass
$12.95, 2004, 85pp, paperback, 146x197mm, 0-9732233-3-2
Combines the lively, challenging work of three experimental poets, Alan Halsey, John Byrum, and Geraldine Monk. Halsey's group of poems resurrects past versions of English, turning with peculiar spellings and striking frictions of their grammar. Byrum's work, entitled "Approximations," is a shifting visual text work mainly utilizing the text block, pointing to the form of a word as art itself. The final selection of Monk's work rounds out the book with her varying forms and sharply constructed lines.
Another Wrong Fedora by John Gribble
Another Wrong Fedora by John Gribble
$15.00, 2005 , 96pp, paperback, 140x215mm, 1-933606-01-0
The world of Another Wrong Fedora is both surreal and super-real. It is inhabited by family, lovers, ghosts, people who are stuck, people who are getting better, people who are famous, and animals, some of whom speak native-level English. With subtle formality, the poems present a world which is lovely, lonely and, despite its flaws, worth caring about.
Aquiline
Aquiline by Jane Joritz-Nakagawa
$12.00, 2007 , 65pp, paperback, 149x210mm, 978-1-933606-11-8
 ... There are few poets who can render emotion with such ferocity and intelligence. Despite all that is said about the materiality of language and limits of subjectivity, life will have its way with us. Aquiline has that kind of urgency, as of last things. Its cry is all the sharper for arriving at times in fragments. (Paul Hoover)
Inside the Kamakura Buddha
Inside the Kamakura Buddha: Poems by Wallace Gagne
$10.00, 68pp, paperback, 1-895666-12-0
His poems are rich in vernacular observations, including the following from the title poem: You're the biggest friggin' Buddha I've ever seen. / Bar none. / Ten thousand tons of bronze and concrete / enlightenment." (Dan Grunebaum, Metropolis Tokyo)   From the back cover: A heavy drinker and red meat eater, Wallace Gagne was born in Vancouver in 1943 but was forced into internal exile in Calgary during the brass monkey winter of 1951. (He graduated from the University of Calgary in 1965)
Investigations & Other Sequences

Investigations & Other Sequences
by Marton Koppany
$12.95, 2003, 70pp, paperback, 146x197mm, 0-9732233-1-6
Marton Koppany is a poet, translator, and editor living in Budapest, Hungary. During the last few years he has been working on different collections of "experimental" poetry. The pieces contained herein were written and published in the eighties and nineties, and exhibited/performed at Woodland Pattern Book Center, Milwaukee.

Kenji Miyazawa: An Asura in Spring

Kenji Miyazawa: An Asura in Spring
  translated by Ruriko Suzuki, with introductions by David Chandler.
$73.50, 1999, 250pp, hardcover, 147x210mm, 4-88198-909-X
The first half of this book consists of the English translations and notes. The second half consists of the poems in Japanese and is taken from the Japanese text edited by Taijirou Amazawa.
Night Moves

Night Moves
by Edgar Henry
2004, 228pp, paperback, 150x215mm, 4-900178-25-X
(This book was published shortly before the poet's untimely death.)
Now Showing: Poems by Jim Daniels
Now Showing: Poems by Jim Daniels 2006, 40pp, paperback, 148x210mm, 105g, 0-9781414-1-5
There is a melancholy sweetness running through these poems that, while not entirely redemptive, offers unexpected relief and enables us to see thatJim Daniels, despite the tough-bitten talk, is a poet born to praise.- Carol Muske, New York Times Book Review; Jim Daniels has, with his third book, become an important successor to James Wright and Phil Levine in describing men’s lives in the industrial heartland of America. - Julia Stein,
Nines by Michel Englebert Nines by Michel Englebert (edited by Hillel Wright & Taylor Mignon) Yen 1,000, 2006
Oulipoems Oulipoems by Philip Terry - Yen 1,500?, 2006, 70pp, 175g, 148x210mm, 978-0-9781414-2-4
The title of Philip Terry's billiant book pays homage to the Oulipo; but while he uses many of the group's methods, he invariably goes his own way  with them, making poems that are full of an original sense of wit and wonder. - Harry Mathews
Photopoems of Japan

Photopoems of Japan
  photos by Kenneth Williams, poems by Wallace Gagne
$10.00, 2005, 50pp, 0-9350861-6-1
L.A.-bred photographer Kenneth Williams teams with Canadian poet Wallace Gagne to distill the essence of their Japanese experience.  Both are longtime residents of Japan with Japanese wives.
She said by Aileen Gemma Fedullo

She said ...
by Aileen Gemma Fedullo
$15.00, 2006,112pp, 1-933606-04-5
The seventy-four poems in She said... are all about connections. Through imagery, Aileen Fedullo takes her reader intimately along a path of experiences. This collection includes a CD with 44 recordings.
So We Have Been Given Time  Or
So We Have Been Given Time   Or   by Sawako Nakayasu
$13.00, 2004, 106pp, paperback, 139x203mm, 0-9746353-0-8
Craig Watson (from back cover): In the world of Sawako Nakayasu there's no distinction between poetry and theater, meditation and action, language and performance. To be alive is to be in motion; every thought/breath/word inalterably changes every other thing/person/time. We are made of verbs and whether the task is "blanking it up" or to "keep mouth full of time," we're always on stage in the theater of language and imagination. Don't read this book -- enact it.
Strange Currencies
Strange Currencies  by Daniel Sendecki
$12.95, 2003, 69pp, paperback, 140x218mm, 0-9732233-0-8
Daniel Sendecki travels through a Far East of haunting contrasts, where 'Roadside children collect lotus flowers to weave into bracelets' while feet away are landmines 'like knives asleep in kitchen drawers imagining meat.' Startling perceptions of past and present, teeming streets and loneliness, killing fields and open sky are juxtaposed in finely textured images, drawing us to touch the mystery hidden between 'the agony and beauty.' How refreshing to read poems that 'Make myself as small as possible' and reach outward, ...
The Santoka: versions by Scott Watson
The Santoka: versions by Scott Watson  illustration by Ed Baker
$10.00, 2005, 41pp, paperback, 180x228mm, 4-915948-41-2 C0098
This book contains selections which previously appeared in the Tohoku Gakuin Review under the titles Weeds We'd Wed: English versions of more than fifty haiku by Taneda Santoka and A Life to Live: Santoka. Scott Watson presents each haiku in Japanese (kana and kanji) followed by his English versions. Explanation is added where needed. more
     More Santoka translation and original poetry by Scott Watson here.


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and suggested books
The Snake That Bowed
I Wouldn't Want Anybody to Know
Getting Both Feet Wet -- the JET Programme
Tokyo Tabloid
The Thames and I The Couch Potato's Guide to Japan
Being-A-Broad in Japan
The Single Tone
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