Tamiko Beyer

In February 2020, the same month Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning was released, I attended a teach-in organized by Tsuru for Solidarity in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Tsuru for Solidarity is a national project led by Japanese Americans working to end detention sites, supporting front-line immigrant and refugee communities, and challenging racist, inhumane […]

Opposite the title page of Sarah Gambito’s third book, Loves You, is printed a black-and-white photo, circa 1985, I ’d guess. Eight people, mostly women, are perched on seats or stand around in a living room, balancing plates of food in hand. Those closest ones to the camera look straight down at their plates, eating and […]

In Oceanic, her luminous fourth collection of poems, Aimee Nezhukumatathil concludes with the image of “a child stepping / out of a fire, shoes / still shiny and clean.”  I encountered this mysterious image on a day in mid-February, 2018. As the temperature hovered at a record-smashing seventy degrees, I re-read the poem, both terrified and comforted by […]