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Cover of "from unincorporated territory" (2008) by Craig Santos Perez, designed by Sumet (Ben) Viwatmanitsakul.
"In the preface to his first book, a lyrical epic on the violent convergences of colonialisms on Guam (Japanese and American), history, family, and language (Chamorro and English), Perez writes: “On some maps, Guam doesn’t exist; I point to an empty space in the Pacific and say, ‘I’m from here.’ On some maps, Guam is a small, unnamed island; I say, ‘I’m from this unnamed place.’ On some maps, Guam is named ‘Guam, U.S.A.’ I say, ‘I’m from a territory of the United States.” On some maps, Guam is named, simply, ‘Guam’; I say, ‘I am from Guam.’”
Right:
The cover for "Diary of Use" (2013) by J. Vera Lee was designed by Allison Hanabusa (actual image by Gaye Chan).
From the book:
“Days will bloom in captivity / We look for repetition / I mistook a shadow / My brain waters like an eye.”
Lehua Taitano, and what are some of the affinities and differences?
As an adoptive parent, I’m also aware that adopted people also have identity issues that are, in their own way, not dissimilar from being hapa or any other kind of mixed identity. [Laughs] I always had huge identity issues, and I think it’s almost inevitable in a publication like ours, in a region like ours, that various forms of “hapaness”—the real form and the metaphorical forms—become really significant.
This book, A Bell Made of Stones, I think, is going to be considered by some people as Pacific Islander poetry and other people as hapa poetry and other people as visual poetry. So, again, it fits in to all sorts of categories that I would just as soon dump. But when you start marketing a book, you start encountering all these different categories.
WC: How does the Tinfish blog interact with the published books?
SS: Oh, the blog is actually more just my blog. I do blog about the publications though, and one of the things I really love about it is, you know, usually it would not be kosher for me to review a book I’ve published, right? On a blog, I can do that. I can think through these things that I publish as a critic. Or, also, as someone who’s an advocate for why that sort of writing is necessary. So the blog becomes the platform on which to sort of implicit-manifesto some of the publications; and then it’s all the other stuff that I write too.
I just write things on the blog because, oddly, it takes some pressure off, even though, later, it’s up there for the world to see, because I don’t have to keep thinking about it once it’s up. I’ve written a couple of books off blogging—the two about dementia started on blogs and I just hacked at them until there was a book there. I just love blogging. It’s terrible [laughs].
WC: [Laughs] Has that shift from printed to online affected the way you think about publishing and editing?
SS: We do have some things on our website that are Internet-only, but for the most part I really like just the object of the book. So for books, I want books.
The Internet, though, has all sorts of other possibilities, both for publicity and also for thinking around what we’re doing. I would be open to doing some more online-only at some point. And we have PDFs of some of our chapbooks that Eric Butler designed and formatted specifically for tablet editions. We have some PDFs of out-of-print work as well that don’t look as good as those, but they’re available for free. So that’s another thing the Internet can be used for is out-of-print material.
WC: Why is it important for people to expose themselves to poetry in general and, more specifically, poetry that is linked directly to the place that they live in?
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