A Daily Glance
Jane Joritz-Nakagawa’s
skin museum is meditative, political, and personal with a distinct sound. By that I mean that the lines are often paratactic, but they border on the use of parataxis by contemporary American writers and the parataxis sometimes used by Japanese poets in short forms. Both types allow the reader to fill in, to come to new understandings, but one type often leaves a little more to follow. Chiefly, this book explores quietly how literature and politics connect, but it also explores personal memories and gender issues. It makes us think about how to read it, though it could be argued, as Iser does, that most books do this. Still, a piece like “En vivo” does this to the extreme because it places two stanzas horizontally next to each other, and we must question how to read the stanzas. Do the lines cross from one stanza to the next? Do the stanzas comment on each other? Since one is narrative and the other not, it makes us consider how the poems after these stanzas should be read. For example, is there a first stanza? Does one have priority? In brief, individual pieces in the book raise some interesting questions, and the book feel like a nice mix of West and East.
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