Bamboo on the Tracks: Sakura Snow and Colt Peacemaker by Tony Wallin-Sato

If you feel disconnected, estranged and enraged from this whirl of maddening sewage issuing from daily life, then read this book, it will clear the air, set your sights on higher ground and balance you out again…great stuff!
–Jimmy Santiago Baca, Poet and winner of the American Book Award, Pushcart Prize, International Hispanic Heritage Award, and International Award, his most recent book is The Misfits, by ARTE PUBLICO press.

“In Tony Wallin-Sato‘s Bamboo on The Tracks grief traverses from door to door, prison cell to mental institution, Alaska to Paris to Kyoto. The poems are peopled with casual encounters, precise and heartbreaking, as well as the meetings and non-meetings of generations between Sato and his mother, Sato and his father, Sato and his grandmother. In the poet’s hand, darkness is ‘stiched with stars’ and cans of Busch Light recall lessons in impermanence. Bamboo on The Tracks combines the fervency of industrial hip-hop and the elegance of jazz. A poetry collection, a witnessing, a manifesto of the heart, an awakening.”

Warmly,
–Abbigail N. Rosewood – author of Constellations of Eve and If I Had Two Lives

Tony Wallin-Sato wants to get back to where he’s from. Trouble is, he’s never been there. This book takes us through the many places he’s been instead. City streets. Back country trails. In and out of Asian ethnicities. Visits to the psych ward. A street funeral. Addiction. Prison. Tony is from trouble. Trouble with identity. Trouble with authority. Kid with a mouth. Kid running the ultimate con: Poetry. The key that gets him through his time. Into classrooms. Bringing others on his journey. Like post cards home, this is wild language looking for roots. Naming the trees: Pacific yew. Blue oak. Ancient bristlecone pine: where solitary carries another meaning. The noodle house where he shares memories with his mother, both of them hungry for culture and spiritual practice. The vacancy where his American father, one year sober, compares places they’ve done time, reveals the true meaning of impermanence. Visits to his mother’s mother: I remind her of back home–a place I haven’t been yet. The journey brings him to the San Francisco Marina and the streets where he learned to walk: to learn/of my memories. I came here to witness my future Messenger, pilgrim, bringer of care: Tony Wallin-Sato wants to take us home.
–Jerry Martien – Author of Infrastructure: Dreams, Divinations, and Dispatches From the Underground

Rimbaud and Whitman and Lorca – oh, my. Tony Wallin-Sato’s poems embody acceptance of experience in their expansiveness, their attentiveness to detail, their love of sounds. Like his favorite authors, Wallin-Sato’s narrators wander and observe, consider and evaluate, and most of all, include. Radical inclusion. The poems contain a gentleness of spirit while addressing the necessary ferocity of survival. They are always questioning, always searching, and the search is spiritual and physical as the poet takes us through cities and landscapes, towns and places of wild quietness. The Virgil of these poems has touched down in jail cells and train cars, mountaintops, coffee shops and galleries, and brings a little piece of each to everywhere else. A mosaic of fire escapes, a Modernist trope, Pall malls and a swamp of men find themselves allied in the first stanza of a poem. Beautiful remnants and residue, things that are crumbling and fenced, abandoned and abundant. And no shortage of loss in the meditative spaces these poems create amidst their density of language, image, and people. I could go on and on. Really, I have gone on too long. Read these poems. Read this book.

–Patty Seyburn – author of Threshold Delivery

“In Bamboo on the Tracks: Sakura Snow and Colt Peacemaker, Tony Wallin-Sato takes us on an intensely personal journey — pain and beauty often traveling hand in hand. He paints arresting images that allow us into a world I wouldn’t otherwise be privy to. But once there, I’m pulled willingly into his reality by the incandescence of his poetry.”
–Amy Uyeki – founding member, Humboldt Asians & Pacific Islanders in Solidarity (HAPI)