Hydra Medusa - Paperback

by Brandon Shimoda (Author)

​A book of poetry, dreams and speculative talks, collected from the psychic detritus of living in the US-Mexico borderlands.

Part coping mechanism, part magical act, Hydra Medusa was composed while Brandon Shimoda was working five jobs and raising a child--during bus commutes, before bed, at sunrise. Encountering the ghosts of Japanese American ancestors, friends, children and bodies of water, it asks: what is the desert but a site where people have died, are dying; are buried, unburied, memorialized, erased. Where they are trying, against and within the energy of it all, to contend with our inherited present--and to live.

Author Biography

Brandon Shimoda is a yonsei poet/writer, and the author of eight books of poetry and prose, including Hydra Medusa (Nightboat Books, 2023). He is also the curator of the Hiroshima Library, an itinerant reading room/collection of books on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which has been installed most recently at the Japanese American National Museum (Los Angeles) and Counterpath Gallery (Denver). His front door faces a mountain.