The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa

Author: Chika Sagawa 

Translator: Sawako Nakayasu 

Publisher: Canarium Books (2015)

The first comprehensive collection of one of Japan's foremost modernists to appear in English translation, The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa is an essential book. Chika Sagawa was a leader of the avant-garde movement in post–World War I Tokyo, a daring experimental poet whose work broke with the gender-bound traditions of Japanese poetry. Growing up in isolated rural Japan, Sagawa would move to Tokyo at seventeen, and begin publishing her work at nineteen. Almost immediately recognized as a leading light of the male-dominated Japanese literary scene, Sagawa’s work combines striking, unique imagery with Western influences. The results are short, sharp, surreal poems about human fragility and the beauty of nature from Japan’s first female Modernist poet.

Winner of the 2016 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation