Literary Arts

Sawako Nakayasu's Pink Waves finalist for PEN Award

Sawako Nakayasu's latest book, Pink Waves, has been selected as a finalist for the PEN/Voelker Award for poetry.  Pink Waves is a poem in conversation with literature and written during a durational performance. Written in loose sonata form, Pink Waves is a poem of radiant elegy and quiet protest. Moving through the shifting surfaces of inarticulable loss, and along the edges of darkness and sadness, Pink Waves was completed in the presence of audience members over the course of a three-day durational performance. Sawako Nakayasu accrues lines written in conversation with Waveform by Amber DiPietro and Denise Leto, and micro-translations of syntax in the Black Dada Reader by Adam Pendleton, itself drawn from Ron Silliman's KetjakPink Waves holds an amalgamation of texts, constructing a shimmering haunting of tenderness, hunger, and detritus. Sawako Nakayasu is assistant professor of Literary Arts.