Mother Said, I Want Your Pain
Bull City Press
July 2026
Reissues
"Mother Said, I Want Your Pain" - Chapbook - Backbone Press
Winner of the Shared Dream Immigrant Contest, 2017
I don’t know, |
Japan experienced World War II, the atomic bombs, and the nuclear accident after the large earthquake around Sendai, along with other social issues. This is a collection of an ordinary Japanese family whose grandparents were involved in wars, and a descendant who has a questionable feeling about having a baby in the current era, even though she wants to be a mother. |
The First Three Pages of "Mother Said, I Want Your Pain"
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. - Janine Joseph , Judge of the 2018 contest
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. - Faisal Mohyuddin, author of The Displaced Children of Displaced Children
"Mother Said, I Want Your Pain" - Poetry Chapbook
The winner of the Shared Dream Immigrant Contest
Published by Backbone Press
Out of Print
The winner of the Shared Dream Immigrant Contest
Published by Backbone Press
Out of Print
