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NAOMIE ANOMIE:
A Biography of Infinite Desire

By Jennifer Hasegawa

From Omnidawn

An experimental poetic take on anti-memoir, NAOMIE ANOMIE grows increasingly surreal as it follows the truths behind its unreliable narrator through paradoxes rendered in luxurious detail. This book is a portrait of a flawed life, a call for attention to the looming ecological omnicrisis, and a lyrical experiment in truth-telling.

This story in verse acts as a survival guide, romance novel, liberation handbook, pulp thriller, and jokebook for those who will live through ongoing plagues, environmental change, total AI integration, water wars, and cyberattacks and who will come out the other side ready to restart.

Praise for…

from Cynthia Arrieu-King, author of Continuity, Futureless Languages, and Manifest, winner of the Gatewood Prize

If you think nothing could be more technicolor, juicy, and full of signifiers come to life than Los Angeles, you have not met (or read) Jennifer Hasegawa’s NAOMIE ANOMIE: A Biography of Infinite Desire. These voluptuous neon lyrics bring you from the infinite loop of its first circular poem into “megatons of ocean” to the gut kick of “you don’t know what things are until you break them.” The taking of the innate, the floral, the paradisiacal—the arrival of Cook in Hawaiʻi—this violence is at the heart of Hasegawa’s poems. In such a world, there’s nowhere to look: sun-dried remnants of narrative, disembodied voices. The father in the poems, he combs “the white curls/steaming from/the forest floor.” You stay on the ride and the poet says, “Psychopomp, ferry her.”

from Ellen Chang-Richardson, author of Blood Belies

In NAOMIE ANOMIE, Jennifer Hasegawa beckons us into a world of surreal code where fairy tales braid with Buddhist spirituality, quantum science, and geomorphology, to weave a realm of delightful absurdity. Through adroit stanzas that echo like the voice of a white rabbit falling headlong beside us, Hasegawa leads us down, down, down, in an intimate tango with memory, familial history, and kinship, until we emerge changed.

from Sunk Coast, musician and composer of the album I felt the urge to push my hair to the side

Hasegawa looks me dead in the eye and paints surreal scenes with a magical matter-of-factness that drags me through time and place like Hector behind the horse cart. Don’t resist. You’ve worked hard enough today. Let her words wrap around your ankle and sweep you off to places you didn’t know you didn’t know—places too scary for nightmares and places so sweet that it hurts that they’re imagined.

from Shinji Eshima, the composer of the quintet, Hymn for Her

References of resentment, both residual and retired, ritualistic and religious, yet refereeing research that remains real. A reckoning of reality without resisting alien ghosts. Resolution or revolution? No, redemption. Jennifer Hasegawa continues the lineage of Kazuko Shiraishi but with the absence of linear time as in Shuri Kido.

 

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Reviews and notes

 
 

process note

Process Note #59: Jennifer Hasegawa on writing NAOMIE ANOMIE, for Maw Shein Win.

Podcast

VerseCurious: Episode 35: Review of Jennifer Hasegawa's NAOMIE ANOMIE by Benjamin Landry.

Review

by rob mclennan: a review of NAOMIE ANOMIE by Jennifer Hasegawa, on rob mclennan's blog.

Photography

Collage

Videos

Making Space: The first 2024 Alta Mesa Center for the Arts reading featuring Dawn Angelicca Barcelona, Celeste Chan, Grace Loh Prasad, and Jennifer Hasegawa. Hosted in collaboration with Maker, Mentor, Muse and facilitated by Candy Shue and Maw Shein Win.

 

The Booksmith presents an evening of readings with Desirée Alvarez, Anthony Cody, Jennifer Hasegawa and Kimberly Reyes on October 29,2020.

 

Reading for the virtual Dia de los Muertos/Day of the Dead SF - Festival of the Altars in which we offer a collaborative ritual with poetry, music, dance, and altar installations.

In this presentation, I read a section of my poem, “Air, Born,” in honor of the East altar, calling the element of air. The East altar is dedicated to our ancestral children, the interconnectedness of life and death, and all things seen and unseen.

 

Videopoems I created for La Chica’s Field Guide to Banzai Living.

All videos are taken from inside my apartment during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

 

An interview and reading from Litseen’s “The Write Stuff” series: Jennifer Hasegawa on the Light Shining Out from Our Navels.

 

A series of video recordings of contemporary poets reading from their work, prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent cancellations, shut-downs and isolations; a reading series you can enjoy in the safety of your own protected space: Emily Murman, Tony Iantosca, Jennifer Hasegawa, Joshua Marie Wilkinson + Claire Farley : virtual reading series #23

Daly City Public Library Celebrates Local Authors: A Virtual Bookfest: "Storage Unit for the Spirit House" by Maw Shein Win. Featuring Maw Shein Win, Jennifer Hasegawa, Jenny Qi, and Audrey T. Williams.

Talk and reading for Healing Around Race: Creative Writing Workshop for the Oakland Asian Cultural Center with Shizue Seigel, Eth-Noh-Tec storytellers Robert Kikuchi Yngojo and Nancy Wang, poet/KFPFA journalist Dennis J Bernstein, and poet/musician/KPFA & POO DJ Avotcja.

 

Reading for Sacred Grounds Open Mic Virtual Venue. The Sacred Grounds Open Mic is the longest running poetry open mic in the US with many thanks to the gracious Dan Brady.

 

Reading for the launch of Vallum17:1 "Home"

Essays

Just over 25 years ago, on September 12, 1993, I stood in the humid early morning air at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Cape Canaveral FL.

My co-workers from the UC Berkeley Space Sciences Lab and I were there to watch the launch of the Space Shuttle Discovery, which held our telescope in its cargo bay.

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How can it be that representative voices of this conference about women in computing — one rising to the top for the first 24 hours and one rising to the top a year later — are not the voices of women?

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A few weeks ago, I accompanied a team of journalists to the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota to cover the peoples’ resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). I joined them as a photographer.

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Radio

In this Flashpoints radio documentary, I talk with Hawai‘i County Mayor Harry Kim, Hawai‘i County Deputy Planner Daryn Arai, and Hawai‘ian language practitioner and educator, Kahi Wight.