Some Girls Walk into the Country They Are From

***This book was read in its entirety, in front of a live audience at Jack Straw Cultural Center, Seattle, March 2023.***In Sawako Nakayasu's first poetry collection in seven years, an unsettling diaspora of "girls" is deployed as poetic form, as reclamation of diminutive pseudo-slur, and as characters that take up residence between the thick border zones of language, culture, and shifting identity. Written in response to Nakayasu's 2017 return to the US, this maximalist collection invites us to reexamine our own complicity in reinforcing literary convention. The book radicalizes notions of "translation" as both process and product, running a kind of linguistic interference that is intimate, feminist, and playfully jagged.