48
1Episode Info
Yuki Tanaka’s stunning debut, Chronicle of Drifting, explores rootlessness, its beauty and perils. Tanaka’s restless imagination roams among places and personae—a village mermaid, a geisha in the Midwest, a flâneur in Tokyo—searching for a permanent self and a sense of community. In the feverish world of these poems, inspired by the Japanese tradition of tanka and haiku, as well as by timeless surrealism, one meets a light-lashed horse, an imaginary chauffeur, an out-of-business psychic, a girl who skewers a fish with a flower stalk. In poems ranging from lyric to prose, Tanaka creates a poignant dreamlike realm where the inner and outer worlds, the self and others, merge—like the train passenger who, looking out the window and seeing the sky through his reflection, feels “empty, a blue outline.”
For this episode, host Yesol Kim (Accent Sisters 2025 Summer Fellow) and co-host Tianyi are joined by poet and Accent's longtime friend Yuki Tanaka. Together, they discuss creating "anti-gravity" lightness in poetry, writing against autobiography, translating Japanese surrealist poet Shuzo Takekuchi, and, last but not least, the proximity of despair to hope in these imaginative and original poems.
Chronicle of Drifting is available for purchase at Accent Sisters in store and online.
Guest Bio
Yuki Tanaka was born and raised on a small island in Yamaguchi, Japan. His poems have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. He has also cotranslated, with Mary Jo Bang, A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi, published by Princeton University Press. He received an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin, and a PhD in English from Washington University in St. Louis. He lives in Tokyo and teaches at Hosei University.
