Epicanthus

Hiromi Yoshida's second poetry chapbook, Epicanthus, offers a lyrical panorama of fortune cookies, TV dinners, Chinese lanterns, and Japanese war brides. Such iconic American commodities and handpicked orientalia coexist with Japanese grandmothers, Taiwanese fathers, and lost-and-found German cousins-unfurling a palimpsest of transpacific Asian American relocations and dislocations, the epicanthus being the arbitrary threshold where the psychodrama of racial identity formation takes place. The hooded eye winks back, a coy invitation to the poet's ingeniously reinvented worlds. At once deeply personal and searingly historical, these new poems provide unforgettable snapshots of Asian American life.