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MOTHER SAID, I WANT YOUR PAIN
"Mother Said, I Want Your Pain" (The winner of the Shared Dream Immigrant Contest, selected by Janine Joseph) will be available from Backbone Press (Spring 2018). Pre-Order your copy today from Backbone Press!
Please support Backbone Press. This press has, like any other small publisher, a passion to present poets’ creations to the world, reading hundreds of submissions and managing multiple business functions while maintaining their lives and families. “Mother Said, I Want Your Pain” is up for pre-order now. Please order from Backbone Press directly through their website.
Janine Joseph , Judge of the 2018 contest
Of the collection, Janine Joseph writes:“I do not know/ if I am even right to be a mother at a right time,” discloses the speaker in the opening poem of Mother Said, “I Want Your Pain.” Evocative and startling in their unflinching clarity of image, these poems are inheritors of the aftermath of nuclear fallout and chemical warfare. They are tuned to the movement of transgenerational traumas. Grandmothers who “hid in a ditch with three horses” while B-29s shot bullets overhead, leave relatives who later ask of our bequeathed earth, “Is the land poisoned or not poisoned?” Here is a striking collection with a deft voice, poised even as it turns on or transcends an observation or emotion: “Grandfather watches TV on the highest volume,/ the howling-wind.”
Faisal Mohyuddin, author of The Displaced Children of Displaced Children
"What remains, in the aftermath of the horrors humans wreak upon other humans? According to Naoko Fujimoto’s brave, ambitious poems: so many kinds of heartache and grief and so many questions that elude answers, and also the ghosts of dead grandparents and unborn children haunting quiet afternoons spent among fields of wildflowers or along lonely lake beaches. Yet these poems remind the reader—especially the one who reads with heart wide, wide open—that pain, when shared with others, can root us deeper in our collective humanity, can guide us all toward compassion, empathy, perhaps even healing. “It chokes us without a sign, or smell—,” the poet writes, “as if a radioactive current swallowed, / hurting slowly inside / to ripen our bodies.” I so deeply admire the mother who says, “I want your pain,” so deeply admire, too, this poet who has found the words to both capture this pain and to transcend it with such hopefulness and beauty."
Silvia Bonila, author of An Animal Startled by the Mechanisms of Life
"In Naoko Fujimoto’s “Mother Said, I Want Your Pain”, there are rooms without doors nor windows. Time becomes ecstatic and intimate. The reader walks into these rooms allured by the un-adorned but skillful language, the spectral beauty of the imagery and the haunting narrative of emptiness. Voluntary exile and loss are found in passages like the kitchen was dyed empty green like a milk glass. Fujimoto’s heightened sensitivity and connection to nature enhances the physical times in the speaker’s personal history, as in / because there is no answer/ beetles roll/ ants dismantle/ unwrapped pacifiers/ ghost teeth bite my nipples."
Of the collection, Janine Joseph writes:“I do not know/ if I am even right to be a mother at a right time,” discloses the speaker in the opening poem of Mother Said, “I Want Your Pain.” Evocative and startling in their unflinching clarity of image, these poems are inheritors of the aftermath of nuclear fallout and chemical warfare. They are tuned to the movement of transgenerational traumas. Grandmothers who “hid in a ditch with three horses” while B-29s shot bullets overhead, leave relatives who later ask of our bequeathed earth, “Is the land poisoned or not poisoned?” Here is a striking collection with a deft voice, poised even as it turns on or transcends an observation or emotion: “Grandfather watches TV on the highest volume,/ the howling-wind.”
Faisal Mohyuddin, author of The Displaced Children of Displaced Children
"What remains, in the aftermath of the horrors humans wreak upon other humans? According to Naoko Fujimoto’s brave, ambitious poems: so many kinds of heartache and grief and so many questions that elude answers, and also the ghosts of dead grandparents and unborn children haunting quiet afternoons spent among fields of wildflowers or along lonely lake beaches. Yet these poems remind the reader—especially the one who reads with heart wide, wide open—that pain, when shared with others, can root us deeper in our collective humanity, can guide us all toward compassion, empathy, perhaps even healing. “It chokes us without a sign, or smell—,” the poet writes, “as if a radioactive current swallowed, / hurting slowly inside / to ripen our bodies.” I so deeply admire the mother who says, “I want your pain,” so deeply admire, too, this poet who has found the words to both capture this pain and to transcend it with such hopefulness and beauty."
Silvia Bonila, author of An Animal Startled by the Mechanisms of Life
"In Naoko Fujimoto’s “Mother Said, I Want Your Pain”, there are rooms without doors nor windows. Time becomes ecstatic and intimate. The reader walks into these rooms allured by the un-adorned but skillful language, the spectral beauty of the imagery and the haunting narrative of emptiness. Voluntary exile and loss are found in passages like the kitchen was dyed empty green like a milk glass. Fujimoto’s heightened sensitivity and connection to nature enhances the physical times in the speaker’s personal history, as in / because there is no answer/ beetles roll/ ants dismantle/ unwrapped pacifiers/ ghost teeth bite my nipples."
HOME, NO HOME
Home, No Home - Poetry Chapbook - Published by Educe Press
The winner of the first annual Oro Fino Chapbook Competition
People happily live.... That is ideal; however, unwanted events happen-earthquakes, tsunamis, cancer, brain surgery, unfilled love, or not making monthly rent. Naoko Fujimoto, a Japanese poet, adapted these scenes into first-person narratives, in which ordinary people face these broken moments.
Diane Raptosh, Judge of the 2015 contest
"It is gritty and raw, earthy and spare, crafted superbly."
Serena Agusto-Cox, writer at Savvy Verse & Wit
"Naoko Fujimoto has deep silences that activate the reader’s mind, which turns each moment over and over to make sense of the devastation. From the deadly tsunami in Fukushima to more subtle moments of broken lives, Fujimoto takes on a first-person narrative in these literary poems to draw readers into that sadness, that loss, that emptiness, the silence to render grief alive."
Ryan Sanford Smith, MFA from the University of Notre Dame
"This is an immaculately crafted, emotionally devastating collection. There's so much elegant silence in these poems,but the carry a great deal of genuine heartbreak. The language is deft, the images are forceful and haunting. I cannot recommend this chapbook strongly enough."
Amazon Book Reviews
"A beautiful, small collection of poetry that cuts to the heart and head. Crisp style. Sharp language. Some of these poems sat with me for days" and "This is a stunning collection of poetry. Read the first poem "Seventeen Blue".
The winner of the first annual Oro Fino Chapbook Competition
People happily live.... That is ideal; however, unwanted events happen-earthquakes, tsunamis, cancer, brain surgery, unfilled love, or not making monthly rent. Naoko Fujimoto, a Japanese poet, adapted these scenes into first-person narratives, in which ordinary people face these broken moments.
Diane Raptosh, Judge of the 2015 contest
"It is gritty and raw, earthy and spare, crafted superbly."
Serena Agusto-Cox, writer at Savvy Verse & Wit
"Naoko Fujimoto has deep silences that activate the reader’s mind, which turns each moment over and over to make sense of the devastation. From the deadly tsunami in Fukushima to more subtle moments of broken lives, Fujimoto takes on a first-person narrative in these literary poems to draw readers into that sadness, that loss, that emptiness, the silence to render grief alive."
Ryan Sanford Smith, MFA from the University of Notre Dame
"This is an immaculately crafted, emotionally devastating collection. There's so much elegant silence in these poems,but the carry a great deal of genuine heartbreak. The language is deft, the images are forceful and haunting. I cannot recommend this chapbook strongly enough."
Amazon Book Reviews
"A beautiful, small collection of poetry that cuts to the heart and head. Crisp style. Sharp language. Some of these poems sat with me for days" and "This is a stunning collection of poetry. Read the first poem "Seventeen Blue".
Silver Seasons of Heartache
Silver Seasons of Heartache - Poetry Chapbook - Published by Glass Lyre Press
This original manuscript was the finalist of the 2016 Sunken Garden Chapbook Poetry Award by Tupelo Press.
Matthew Thorburn, author of Dear Almost
In Silver Seasons of Heartache, Naoko Fujimoto walks a tightrope of language, making her way word by word across the chasm where hope can fall prey to heartbreak, the maybes and might-bes of life transformed into what simply (and complicatedly) is. She is a poet of heart and humor, of insight and image. In carefully crafted yet conversational lines, Fujimoto describes the complications of our modern lives, where “enough is never enough,” but where you also might still be lucky enough to stop and savor the moment when your “breath is quiet— / waiting to catch the last lightning bug.”
Nancy Botkin, author of Parts That Were Once Whole
Silver Seasons of Heartache is full of compelling poems that engage the senses as they navigate physical and emotional spaces: the kitchen, the family, the homeland, and the edges of this mysterious and precarious life. In “A Big Bowl of Beef Stew” she writes, “Past midnight, from the deepest forest, / a deer walked on weathered leaves.” These are lovely poems, and Fujimoto’s talent is the deep image.
This original manuscript was the finalist of the 2016 Sunken Garden Chapbook Poetry Award by Tupelo Press.
Matthew Thorburn, author of Dear Almost
In Silver Seasons of Heartache, Naoko Fujimoto walks a tightrope of language, making her way word by word across the chasm where hope can fall prey to heartbreak, the maybes and might-bes of life transformed into what simply (and complicatedly) is. She is a poet of heart and humor, of insight and image. In carefully crafted yet conversational lines, Fujimoto describes the complications of our modern lives, where “enough is never enough,” but where you also might still be lucky enough to stop and savor the moment when your “breath is quiet— / waiting to catch the last lightning bug.”
Nancy Botkin, author of Parts That Were Once Whole
Silver Seasons of Heartache is full of compelling poems that engage the senses as they navigate physical and emotional spaces: the kitchen, the family, the homeland, and the edges of this mysterious and precarious life. In “A Big Bowl of Beef Stew” she writes, “Past midnight, from the deepest forest, / a deer walked on weathered leaves.” These are lovely poems, and Fujimoto’s talent is the deep image.
WHERE I WAS BORN
Naoko Fujimoto's first full-length poetry book, "Where I Was Born," will be available from Willow Books (Spring 2019)
Graphic Poetry = Trans. Sensory
Naoko Fujimoto's graphic poetry collection, "Glyph:Graphic Poetry=Trans. Sensory", is coming soon (Winter 2019) from Tupelo Press. Her progress can be seen at WHITE WORDS.
