Ito Hiromi / 伊藤比呂美

Ito Hiromi, born in 1955 in Tokyo, is one of the most important and dynamic poets of contemporary Japan. After her sensational debut in the late 1970s, she emerged as the foremost voice of the wave of “women’s poetry” that swept Japan in the 1980s. To date, she has published more than a dozen critically acclaimed collections of poetry, several novels, and numerous books of essays. She has won many important Japanese literary prizes, including the Takami Jun Prize, the Hagiwara Sakutara Prize, and the Izumi Shikibu Prize. She now lives outside of San Diego with her partner Harold Cohen, her youngest daughter, and her two dogs. Killing Kanoko: Selected Poems of Hiromi Ito, from which the poems featured here were taken, published by Action Books in 2009 and translated by Jeffrey Angles, was her first book-length collection of poetry in English.

Translations from the Japanese by Jeffrey Angles.

 

• The Maltreatment of Meaning / 意味の虐待
• Father’s Uterus, Or the Map / 父の子宮あるいは一枚の地図
• Nashite Mounen / ナシテ、モーネン
• Underground / 土の下
•  Trans-Population / トランス、ポピュレイション