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Stone Bow Prayer

Amy Uyematsu is an award-winning poet who by day switches from right to left brain to teach algebra and geometry in public high school. The result of her poetry-math life is a fascinating, far-flung but surprisingly connected book that interlinks mathematics, poetry, politics and spirit. Stone Bow Prayer is a remarkable journey in which—as one poem suggests—“Geometry Gets Mixed Up with God and the Alphabet,” and the infinite and minute nurture one another.Amy Uyematsu is a sansei (third-generation Japanese American), author of two books of poetry and the recipient of the prestigious Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. She co-edited Roots: An Asian American Reader, one of the first anthologies in Asian American studies. She lives near Los Angeles.

Paperback: 96 pages

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press; First Paperback Edition edition (June 1, 2005)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 1556592213

ISBN-13: 978-1556592218

Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.4 x 9.1 inches

Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)

Best Sellers Rank: #1,269,021 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #106 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Poetry > Regional & Cultural > United States > Asian American #112024 in Books > Literature & Fiction > United States

Let's begin by saying that I do not like to write reviews. I resist the impulse. To my thinking, a great many reviewers use the podium to pronounce themselves superior to the art they review. I'll not have it.Such said, I want to make a rare personal exception to recommend to you Amy Uyematsu's beautiful and searing Stone Bow Prayer. This is a really amazing book.Reviewers love extended metaphors. Here's mine. Amy Uyematsu's book is rather like a bird's nest. Composed of whatever is best available, it is all woven together with no architectural pomposity, but rather instinctive grace. The pieces work because the whole is a kind of necessity, a genetic imperative. Blending rage, love, tenderness, autobiography, curiosity, cultural yearning and history, among other strands and straws, Ms. Uyematsu creates a rare and strange miracle here, as if any miracle were not strange or rare.Of course, the individual poems themselves are really wonderful. Her voice is always clear and crisp, a mockingbird call in the morning, when most of us are just beginning to arise for the long hours and the dull routines. Do you know the sound? The mockingbird remembers everything, all of life's echoes, but transforms it in her own right, striving to find solace through song in a lonely place, our place.Here is a brief excerpt from her poem "Heat." Note the casual elegance that can only arise from truth accurately observed, understood through experience, and honestly rendered:"Has it already been one year/since you said you were leaving me?/You wonder out loud whether the bird/flew north or south for the winter./It's just our luck/that blind, stubborn instinct leads/this noisy bird to our backyard,/to nest in its one lonely tree.

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