Synopsis
Joyce Futa has been living in Altadena, California for the past four years, after living in San Francisco for 50 years. She has been happy to find a wonderful community of poets there. Lit Windows: A Book of Haibun and Tanka Prose is her first book of poetry.
Review
Joyce Futa is a dreamer in the most real sense. She looks with subtlety at the details, awake or asleep, and writes with a quiet power that will inspire her readers to examine and see themselves in their past and present in new ways. Tanka prose and haibun seem her natural voice. Each piece is indeed a "lit window", into which we look in quietly and watch her dream world unfold, her everyday life, her memories, where each object has significance and emotional and literary power. For her, as on her collection of Japanese plates, Mt. Fuji is always in the distance. She muses about her uncle: "Japanese American struggles within the ancient armor" Her natural talent for these Japanese forms seems personal and her insights have a unique perspective. Any object she holds is imbued with meaning, just as we feel in our dreams. They are important, symbolic but mysterious. Her writing, just as the bamboo basket she describes: "turns and folds around thrusting sticks with curves and indentations of a natural life. it holds something an onion, blue beads a bright meditation" Sometimes we don't know if she has invited us into a dream world, her life as it was, or is now. But always we see her moving and our own reflections in her inviting and insightful "Lit Windows". Her beautiful book holds treasures you will want to pick up and reflect upon, again and again. -Kath Abela Wilson, Secretary, Tanka Society of America Joyce Futa casts time into long waves of elegant prose, and then gathers what remains in her poet's net, finding "red jewels [that] glisten/ among membranes/ of memory." With deep noticing, tenderness, and wit, she measures the ways we are shaped and reshaped by everyone who moves through our lives, even through our dreams. This book is a record of "looking up at stars/ through bare branches," tracing the light that comes when one distance touches another. -Brent Armendinger, Author of The Ghost in Us Was Multiplying Joyce Futa's Lit Windows builds with a quiet intensity, much like a great soup whose signature dish is tasted as much through the mystery of its chef as its individual ingredients. And taste we do, slippery as seaweed in broth, with a crisp maple leaf floating on top. We inhale[d] the sweet steam, remembering when all the colors had drifted down in a slow spiral of air. This spiral reaches our senses and functions not as a collection of poems but a memoir of dream and memory, alive with persons and place and beautifully crafted into haunting, profound and sometimes humorous haibuns. A perfect form to capture life's ephemera. Yet, while a number of Futa's haibuns seem autobiographical, they are never merely personal. Lit Windows asks us to reflect on the culture of family whether in the context of Futa's Japanese-American upbringing or our own splintered roots. It is also a history of displacement where immigrants come to a strange and unwelcoming land and try to find their way toward a sense of belonging. But the palette extends outward to the philosophical as Lit Windows takes on the spectrum of beginnings and endings casting our loves and our losses into nourishment of the soul. Here, wisdom sits not with pretention but in the skilled measure of one called upon to observe both our bright and fading worlds. -Lois P. Jones, Poetry Editor, Kyoto Journal
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