Description

Omnidawn, paperback

Publication Date: January 20th, 2023

Publisher Marketing: A poem in conversation with literature and written during a durational performance.

Written in loose sonata form,Pink Wavesis a poem of radiant elegy and quiet protest. Moving through the shifting surfaces of inarticulable loss, and along the edges of darkness and sadness,Pink Waveswas completed in the presence of audience members over the course of a three-day durational performance. Sawako Nakayasu accrues lines written in conversation withWaveformby Amber DiPietro and Denise Leto, and micro-translations of syntax in theBlack Dada Readerby Adam Pendleton, itself drawn from Ron Silliman’sKetjak.Pink Wavesholds an amalgamation of texts, constructing a shimmering haunting of tenderness, hunger, and detritus.

“Nakayasu’sPink Wavesis an experience of questions becoming artifacts. The speaker asks: ‘how will i locate expansiveness in touch’? By ‘dreamlight’, a reader is trained, by this speaker, in a process of listening that’s both a ‘pledge of silence’ and the recognition that ‘we come to a limit and stop where it fits.’ Is this ‘genre trouble’? Nakayasu has written a book a writer could read, orienting to the desk, to the ‘passing moment, ‘ in turn. This is grounding. This is beautiful.”–Bhanu Kapil, author of How to Wash a Heart

“Pink Wavesdeepens my immense admiration for Nakayasu’s poems and translations. Expansive, working across genres, she always pushes her writing into new places. In Pink Waves, she has found another way to rigorously clear a space for herself or, perhaps more accurately, her many selves, attaining a fresh perspective. Registering the world crashing into her life, we hear and learn the different languages that flow around her, as well as encounter references to–and echoes of–Adam Pendelton’s collage textBlack Dada, Valerie Solanas’s radical feministSCUM Manifesto, Sol LeWitt’s ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, ‘ and Ron Silliman’s groundbreakingKetjak. She uses collage to give a resilient, changing shape to our relentless influx of chaos, and the resulting feelings of anxiety, passion, anger, and love stirred up in us. Turning detritus into sensuous music, Nakayasu’s greatness arises from [undertaking] ‘Experiments in Joy, ‘ la Gabrielle Civil, to find a way to live in the here and now.”–John Yau, author of Genghis Chan on Drums