The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa

Winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in TranslationThe "startling" collected works of "one of the most innovative and prominent avant-garde poets in early twentieth-century Japan" (The New Yorker). Translated by and with an introduction by Sawako NakayasuChika 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 eighteen. 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. The Modern Library Torchbearers series features women who wrote on their own terms,...