Chosen one of Booklist's Top Ten History Books of the Year!

The Afterlife Is Letting Go is a meditative consideration of Japanese American incarceration during WWII by Brandon Shimoda, author of the PEN Open Book Award-winning The Grave on the Wall.--Matt Seidel, Publishers Weekly's Big Indie Books

Both personal and choral, The Afterlife is Letting Go is deeply felt, precise, and as generous in its insights as it is unsparing in its critiques of how 'exclusion zones' proliferate and reach across time and space. A stirring, trenchant, and necessary work.--Christina Sharpe, author of Ordinary Notes

In a series of reflective, multi-layered, sometimes multi-voiced essays, poet Brandon Shimoda explores the afterlife of the U.S. government's forced removal and mass incarceration of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans during WWII, excavating the ways these events continue to resonate today. What emerges is a panoramic, yet intimate portrait of intergenerational trauma and healing.

Informed by personal/familial history, years of research and travel, including visits to museums, memorials and the ruins of incarceration sites, these essays take us on both a physical and a metaphysical journey. What becomes increasingly clear are the infinite connections between the treatment of Japanese Americans and other forms of oppression, criminalization, dispossession, and state violence enacted by the United States, past, present, and ongoing.

​A book of poetry, dreams and speculative talks, collected from the psychic detritus of living in the US-Mexico borderlands.

Part coping mechanism, part magical act, Hydra Medusa was composed while Brandon Shimoda was working five jobs and raising a child--during bus commutes, before bed, at sunrise. Encountering the ghosts of Japanese American ancestors, friends, children and bodies of water, it asks: what is the desert but a site where people have died, are dying; are buried, unburied, memorialized, erased. Where they are trying, against and within the energy of it all, to contend with our inherited present--and to live.

A memoir and book of mourning, a grandson's attempt to reconcile his own uncontested citizenship with his grandfather's lifelong struggle.

The Desert is a book actualizing much more than Shimoda's daily logs, his written practice, his fueled language. It is the fuel itself ... the sense of other that has and continues to pervade an American expanse of freedom, symbolically and legally. --Yellow Rabbits Reviews

Brandon Shimoda's The Desert, a sequel to his William Carlos Williams Award-winning book Evening Oracle, guides us deep into, and then back out of, a rich yet desolate North American landscape. Divided into seven sections--featuring poems, letters, diary entries, and photographs--the desert's multiplicity emerges through a ranging exploration of its Japanese American incarceration sites, homeless population, flora and fauna, violence, beauty and how they combine to reflect this poet's contemporary view of history. Written over three years in the deserts of Arizona, the poet introduces us to the souls of the living and dead, their shadows still residing over the landscape and its mythology.
Brandon Shimoda was born in California. He is the author of Evening Oracle (Letter Machine Editions), which received the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and O Bon (Litmus Press), among other books. He lives in the desert.

The Girl Without Arms is a figure in Japanese folklore--a young girl whose arms are lopped off by her father, and is left to die in the mountains. The father, at the behest of his evil wife--the girl's stepmother--lures the girl into the mountains at the promise of attending a neighboring festival. This is only the beginning of the tale.

The poems of Brandon Shimoda's The Girl Without Arms are birthed of the rainy shut-in pause between steps forward and back in a season of great floods. In successive and interlocked sequences, these poems grapple with a seemingly unbridgeable confusion--related to love, the impossibility of life outside of love, and the unbearableness of life within it--as a way to give shape to the dark weather that permeates our lives, so as not to drown at its coming.

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. In EVENING ORACLE, Brandon Shimoda encounters shadows, specters, and women young and old, living and undead and finds himself standing in a graveyard in the middle of a rice field in a town that no longer exists. EVENING ORACLE is composed of poems originally handwritten at night before sleep in the beds of friends and strangers in Japan (2011-2012), and passages from emails and letters to and from friends and family on the subjects of fruit, vegetables, and dying grandparents. Featuring original poems by Dot Devota and Hiromi It, and correspondence by Etel Adnan, Don Mee Choi, Phil Cordelli, Youna Kwak, Quinn Latimer, Mary Ruefle, Rob Schlegel, and Karen McAlister Shimoda, among others.