Poetry at the Rail Park
Episode 2: Sawako Nakayasu
Sawako Nakayasu was born in Japan and raised in the US; she has also lived in France and China along the way. Her most recent books are The Ants (Les Figues Press, 2014), and Texture Notes (Letter Machine, 2010), and recent translations include The Collected Poems of Sagawa Chika (Canarium Books, 2015) and Tatsumi Hijikata’s Costume en Face (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015). Other books include Hurry Home Honey (Burning Deck, 2009) and Mouth: Eats Color — Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-translations, & Originals, which is a multilingual work of both original and translated poetry. She has received fellowships from the NEA and PEN, and her own work has been translated into Japanese, Norwegian, Swedish, Arabic, Chinese, and Vietnamese. Sawako Nakayasu has also made numerous performances and one short film and currently teaches at Brown University in the Department of Literary Arts. Nakayasu’s translations of Chika Sagawa are included in the Rail Park installation “Dawn Chorus.”
