shima by Sh Yamagushiku

The village is tilting on its axis. It is turning. All its organs are spilling into the bay.

shimais a mosaic of the emotional, psychic, and generational toll that exile from a pillaged culture impresses on a poet and his community. Come to haunt Yamagushiku's practice of ancestor veneration are photographs and a narrative that spans his own life and a mythic parallel filled with a voice as spare as it is present, yearning as it is precise. The poet says,I am taking the sharpest stick and poking the root ancestor. I am insisting that if he awakens I will have something useful to say.

Speaking through a cultural amnesia collected betweena sunken past and a sensed, ghostly-dreamed future,shimaanchors this interrogation of the relationship between father and son in the fragile connective tissue of memory where the poet's homeland is an impossible destination.(McClelland & Stewart)

• 37 poetry collections to read this spring

Sh Yamagushiku is a writer and researcher living in Victoria. shima is his debut poetry collection.