From the small towns strung along the coast of the Big Island of Hawai‘i to the land-locked landscapes of Paraguay to the volcanic surface of Venus, this is a field guide to flora, fauna, and mineralia encountered, real and imagined.
Packed tightly into exploratory rocket segments, these poems ignite our gravest flaws to send our grandest potentials into orbit, sprinkling us all with an antidotal salve to viewing any life as ordinary.
Praise for…
Hasegawa’s surreal, spectacular intelligence crackles through La Chica’s Field Guide to Banzai Living like high-voltage current through a trunk line. Like its throw-down title, this book mixes the flirty with the elucidating and the go-for-broke. . . . Many poems reveal Hasegawa’s tender attachment to family in her native Hawai‘i, to the sagas of daily life and natural beauty there, which bow but don’t break under the ongoing pressures of colonization. This may be the key to Hasegawa’s poetics: the resilience, the fierce intelligence, the banzai resolve to ‘live for ten thousand years’, not as a war cry but as a love letter, To Anyone Who Can’t Get Home.
Mary Burger, author of Then Go On
Welcome to the Kingdom, its taxonomies and subjugations, its streets and kick ass bards. There are many ways to read La Chica’s Field Guide: a testament to the exponential speed of inequities; a chronicling of a third-generation Japanese American woman’s kamikaze-like memory, witness and resistance; an invocation of the epic power of the familial and the communal as evidenced by the simplest joys and our deepest sorrows. Amidst all of it, is the brilliant, resolute, invincible language of Hasegawa. ‘Astounding alien / clean progenitor of the / new tongue of the ages. She / is here.
Aja Couchois Duncan, author of Restless Continent
Buckle up for Jennifer Hasegawa’s exhilarating ride, whatever sort of displaced being you might be—from immigrant to extraterrestrial—and consult this manual. Follow the poems as they careen through assorted omens and ‘ghosts of sovereignty.’ Touching down in Hawai‘i, California, and other parts of the world, Hasegawa carries her baggage with aplomb. She’s all-too-aware of how old family folkways can linger with the ‘slow-burrowing hoodoo/of suggestion.’ And she’s brazen enough to push through to the next realm of possibilities . . . Let her show you the turns—both thorny and tender— and you just might awaken there.
Molly Bendall, author of Watchful
In the West, the word “banzai” was mostly recognized as the WWII battle cry of kamikaze pilots, but in truth, the word literally means 10,000 years and is associated with wishes for long life and celebration. It is a word that is both complex and compelling. The same could be said for the poems in Hasegawa’s La Chica’s Field Guide to Banzai Living. The collection takes us from Hawai‘i to the U.S. Continent to Babylon to outer space, and Hasegawa’s use of story is both empowering and arresting. . . . What I admire most about Hasegawa’s poems is how she uses darkness to reveal what the world today desperately needs—the presence of light.
Lisa Linn Kanae, author of Sista Tongue