Morio Hayashida — Six Poems
An Issei newspaper writer and gardener turns alienation, illness, memory, and Los Angeles light into six fierce, dreamlike poems rescued across language and time.
Carlos Bulosan — Collected Poems
Carlos Bulosan wrote from the migrant camp, the hospital room, the union hall, and the imagined battlefield. This edition restores twenty-nine works from original witnesses: fourteen poems published in Poetry between 1936 and 1942, the five-poem sequence from Chorus for America, and the complete Voice of Bataan. An extensive biography follows his disputed birth record, 1930 passage to Seattle, West Coast labor and literary networks, wartime fame, federal surveillance, Local 37 work, final Seattle years, and posthumous recovery.
Alfonso P. Santos — A Garland of Sampaguitas
Alfonso P. Santos wrote A Garland of Sampaguitas while studying in Los Angeles, but the book’s imaginative center is San Antonio, Zambales. Its flowers, winds, birds, moonlight, and remembered streets become a vocabulary for distance: the poems speak from California toward a Philippine home that is sensuously present and physically unreachable. Don Blanding’s introduction recognized the manuscript’s open feeling, while Santos himself described sampaguita fragrance as poetry’s mixture of youth, sorrow, love, and suggestion.
Moon Kwan — Collected Poems
Moon Kwan crossed the Pacific with poetry in one hand and a movie camera in the other. He became an early Chinese American poet in English, translated Li Po and Wang Wei for national magazines, advised Hollywood, fought for Cantonese cinema, and spent seven decades turning cultural translation into art.
Bunichi Kagawa — Collected Poems
A teenage immigrant and Stanford domestic taught himself English poetry, published a hand-printed modernist book, and became a crucial bilingual mentor behind Japanese American literary magazines before and during incarceration. Kagawa’s spare poems turn skyscrapers, violets, hunger, village sunlight, and the night sky into fierce tests of identity.
F. Fukuzo Tanaka — Songs of Hyakunin-Isshu Anglicized
A Los Angeles metaphysical writer undertook an audacious feat: recasting all one hundred poems of Japan’s Hyakunin Isshu into thirty-one-syllable English, then explaining every poem in his own unmistakable voice. This edition restores that rare 1938 experiment together with Tanaka’s surviving original verse.