Hydra Medusa

Building on his Evening Oracle (2015) and The Desert (2018), Brandon Shimoda’s wide-ranging collection, Hydra Medusa, includes lyric poems, essays on the Japanese American experience of US concentration camps during World War II, and diaristic poems on family life and writing.

The opening poems palpably occur in the aftermath of great violence. Glitching language flickers over surveilled bodies: “innocence / was emptiness,” “the dead       a perfect instrument,” “the living. are late. / always clutching, their face,” “The flag is sinew / and flesh kind of anger,” “steppe fires were suspended / from gallows”.

When Shimoda moves from these poems to coolly recount, in prose, the violence suffered by interred Americans of Japanese origin, the gathered emotion of the preceding work vibrates beneath each line, even as his writing remains titanium-light. In one passage, he uses a measured tone to devastating effect while dissecting the case of Private First Class Clarence Burleson:

Burleson was not any white American man. He was the protector of white American men. Whereas white American men might have fantasized putting a bullet into the body of a Japanese man, Burleson did, and the bullet was government-issue. He arbitrated, in eighteen shots, Kobata’s and Isomura’s citizenship.

 

The book’s energy shifts near the end, when Shimoda reflects on what it means to parent in a broken world, bearing the legacy of trauma:

All mammals grieve, but lack the muscles
to make us feel
the tenderness of the inhuman

The poet recalls a walk in a neighborhood park with his toddler: “More flowers, Yumi says, walking through flowers.” A child’s perspective brings a radically different too-muchness, one that buoys instead of burdening: “Further along, as we walked through a stretch of bright yellow and orange flowers, Yumi bent over to smell them, as she does with all flowers, and declared, simply: Too many.”

This collection is at once a memorial to the past and a survey of its aftermath. Any single section would alone form a strong book. In Hydra Medusa, Shimoda has created a cohesive work of great depth and power.