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…
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.”
—Cynthia Arrieu-King, author of Continuity, Futureless Languages, and Manifest, winner of the Gatewood Prize
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.
—Ellen Chang-Richardson, author of Blood Belies
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.
—Sunk Coast, musician and composer of the album I felt the urge to push my hair to the side
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.
—Shinji Eshima, the composer of the quintet, Hymn for Her
