MAMA by Michelle Naka Pierce

In Mama, Michelle Naka Pierce pieces together her mother’s many lives—one they share/d; one before, her mother as a fourteen year old girl living under the nightly firebombings of Tokyo; one that can only be told in her mother’s native tongue; one that can be said out loud in the language spoken by her American husband; one that must remain unspoken; one which the past and the present congress but to which there is no future tense. Pierce takes a thread, piecing together her mother’s fragmented and imperfect stories, and when there is silence, the poet looks to archival and historical voices. This book is important for both its portrayal of gaps of shared stories even in its most intimate familial form and for the unintentional erasure of stories. Pierce’s mother’s stories are private, but public; knowable and unknowable; intimate yet estranged. This book is a gesture toward capturing her mother’s memories that are slowly disintegrating, a gesture of mourning before the inevitable, the cleaving before the terrible future.

–Mariko Nagai

In poignant, clear, and devastating language, Michelle Naka Pierce recreates her mother’s memories of U.S. firebombing in Japan amidst her current struggle with dementia. Layering cultural reckoning with daughterly devotion, the poet tries to recover “This moving memorī, looping in and spilling out.” This urgent work insists on overhearing, catching maternal breath, and extending tenderness. Mama is a dodged bomb, a remembered shovel, a repeated promise, and a war-torn lullaby.

–Gabrielle Civil

Michelle Naka Pierce‘s chapbook Mama explores the shared life of daughter and elderly mother and the decline of their shared narrative. A present day thunderstorm echoes the dropping of the atom bomb over Hiroshima: the daughter poet’s first word as a baby as lost as is the clean narrative line: “All this and not resembling. The change has come / not once, not once, not once a border here.” From a thousand points across their lives, across wars, nations, and decades, the poet builds omniscience into this exquisitely watchful nest of eyes, these memorī.

–Cynthia Arrieu-King