Icarus Burning drops like a bombshell on the sexy and sexless landscapes of the feminine experience. Hiromi Yoshida’s sinuous lines probe the façades of fragile beauty and empowerment in post-9/11 America and back through history. These poems reflect the conflict of gazed-upon women as back-alley spectacle elevated to epic. Out of airports, Kroger, and strip clubs come heroines, victims, harlots, and anonymous streetwalkers, alongside Helen of Troy, Eve, Sylvia Plath, Rosa Parks, and Patty Hearst. Recalling Diane di Prima or Anne Waldman, Yoshida’s astute and academic playfulness turns a magnifying glass on a universe on fire from that focused beam. Radically political and deeply personal, Icarus Burning is a deep dive into the intimate symbology of women.
–Tony Brewer, Author of Homunculus
In Hiromi Yoshida’s Icarus Burning, the reader quickly splashes into a sea of slithery eroticism, only to be swept by relentless waves of viscera. Her eye-opening poems plunge into such topics as the aftermath of abortion, late-life menstruation, menopause, stiletto sex, nude models, even rape. But ultimately recovery—and resurrection.
–JL Kato, Author of Shadows Set in Concrete
Filled with visceral poems that yearn to be read out loud, Hiromi Yoshida’s debut chapbook Icarus Burning is celebration in language. The poet engages the reader with searing images beginning with the opening title poem, which has its origins in the 9-11 attack at the World Trade Center. “The Aztec heart of the sun blazes a rush hour trail of amniotic blood,” writes Yoshida. In these deeply personal poems are image-rich character studies and vignettes that are rooted in place: a panhandler at the local Kroger who is “an unlikely grey specter in the south side of Bloomington, Indiana,” a co-worker “porcelain lady,” who, together with the speaker, were “caged birds of a different species” at an Interlibrary Loan (ILL) Department. At times apocalyptic and always unflinching, Icarus Burning ends with a nod toward hope and resilience as the poet tells us “Green roses bloomed for all of us when Icarus fell from the sky.”
–Nancy Chen Long, Author of Light into Bodies
David Mura –
Hiromi Yoshida is clearly a poet willing to soar beyond the familiar and easy, and she’s unafraid to go down in flames. Icarus Burning is a dazzling mixture of myth filtered through thick verbal textures and re-envisionings of Times Square strippers, sexual trauma, Rosa Parks and Sylvia Plath. The latter is obviously an influence, but so is Ginsberg and the Beats, and she reaches notes of the outré that remind me of Frederick Seidel. She comes at her subjects from odd askew angles and surprises the reader with her audacity. Her voice is distinctive and charged–she embraces the untoward and difficult–and her promising poetic flight is just beginning.
–David Mura, The Last Incantations and A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity & Narrative Craft in Writing