POSTED BY MARTIN KICH

On the day before Thanksgiving, the poem featured in the Poem-a-Day newsletter of the Academy of American Poets was Sawako Nakayasu’s prose poem “Deflated Rubber Turkey.”

This wonderfully light and yet riddle-like poem is available at: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/deflated-rubber-turkey?utm.

Sawako Nakayasu is an Assistant Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University.

She is the author of several poetry collections, including The Ants  (2014), Texture Notes (2010), Hurry Home Honey (2009), and So We Have Been Given Time Or (2004), which was selected for the Verse Prize by Ann Lauterbach. Mouth: Eats Color—Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-Translations, & Originals (2011) is a book of both translation and original work.

Nakayasu translated The Collected Poems of Sagawa Chika (2014); Kawata Ayane’s Time of Sky & Castles in the Air (2010); Takashi Hiraide’s For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut (2008), for which she received a PEN Translation Fund Award; and Four from Japan: Contemporary Poetry & Essays by Women (2006, with additional translations by Cole Swenson, Ryoko Sekiguchi, Chet Wiener, Yu Nakai, and Malinda Markham).

Nakayasu’s own work has been translated into several languages, including Swedish, Arabic, Japanese, and Vietnamese.

Her website is located at: http://www.sawakonakayasu.net/.