Northwest Asian Weekly

nwasianweekly.com December 27, 2003
Join the Northwest Asian Weekly for its second-annual Rainbow Bookfest: Celebrating Authors of Color at Union Station, Fifth Avenue and Jackson Street in Seattle, on April 24, 2004. This year’s event will feature a poetry slam, workshops for kids and many new workshops with and by authors of color. Visit www.rainbowbookfest.com.
A quick look at books by Ann-Marie Stillion
The Magic Whip, by Wang Ping. Published by Coffee House Press, 2003. What I enjoy most about Wang Ping’s poetry is her ability to regard all things, whether good or bad, beautiful or terrible, with equal amounts of respect. A publication from the small but prestigious non-profit publisher, Coffee House Press, in Minneapolis, hew newest book of poems, The Magic Whip cuts into human experience — here in America and faraway in Wang’s Chinese native land — with precision. The poet is fearless when she speaks through the great woman poet Li Qingzhao, bringing to life the celebrated writer as a crone reflecting back on her successes. She is brilliant when she takes on Tibet in a poem dedicated to Allen Ginsburg, “Eight Thousand Miles of Roads”; she connects her American and Chinese experiences with an ease that is rare and wonderful in its passion — and deeply important in our rapidly changing world. In an introduction to a poem about Sept. 11, 2001, Wang notes that the form of the work is taken from a ritual Chinese song in 300 B.C. “Great Summons” begins with “All names are beautiful ...” Magic Whip is her second book of poetry but her fifth book overall. Wang has been producing award-winning poems and prose in the American literary scene in a meteoric rise of creative output. She arrived in the United States in 1985 to study for her Ph.D. at New York University, and just a few short years later was published in the anthology The Best American Poetry 1993. Her 1994 short story collection American Visa chronicles hers and other stories of life in the Cultural Revolution. The novel Foreign Devil addresses similar territory. Her first book of poems, Of Flesh and Spirit, follows the poet across the U.S. and in her first return to China after 10 years of being away. Her other books include New Generation: Poetry from China Today and Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China. Designing with Kanji: Japanese Character Motifs for Surface, Skin and Spirit, by Shogo Oketani and Leza Lowitz. Published by Stone Bridge Press, 2003. Another small but important publisher, Stone Bridge Press, in Berkeley, Calif., recently expanded its already considerable collection of unique culture and art books with this delightful manual. Designing with Kanji is an ode to the Eastern typographic element, a clip-art book and a short but focused history of the Japanese language itself. Tattoo artists, designers and those in need of selected “spiritual ideograms” will enjoy this book. As the authors point out, the playful use of American words in Japan and the use of Japanese characters as decorative elements in the U.S. has opened up an entirely new area of design and product development. All of the kanji in the book is copyright-free, and the book designers have used a grid throughout that helps the beginner grasp the characters with little study. Designing with Kanji offers four typographic approaches to each character — formal, modern, flowing and stylish — along with historical and linguistic information. Sometimes these references are stories in themselves; sometimes they are easy explanations of ideograms. For example, the word patriotism is made of three ideograms that mean “love,” “country” and “heart-mind-soul.” The authors explain that the Japanese don’t like to use this word due to its associations with World War II. As readers, we get to enjoy a short study of the shapes of the characters (if we are new to the language) and relevant cultural insights. Both authors are writers and translators who live in Tokyo and have “deep connections” to the Bay Area. Oketani graduated from Keio University in Tokyo with a degree in philosophy and literature and Lowitz is a popular yoga teacher in Tokyo and author of another Stone Bridge Press imprint, Yoga Poems. Ann-Marie Stillion can be reached at annmarie@nwasianweekly.com.

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