City Lights and Tsuru for Solidarity celebrate the publication of
The Afterlife Is Letting Go
by Brandon Shimoda
published by City Lights Books
Brandon Shimoda will read from his work
ATTENTION: This event has been rescheduled from the previous date of Wednesday, January 15, 2025.
In a series of reflective, multi-layered, sometimes multi-voiced essays, poet Brandon Shimoda explores the “afterlife” of the U.S. government’s forced removal and mass incarceration of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans during WWII, excavating the ways these events continue to resonate today. What emerges is a panoramic, yet intimate portrait of intergenerational trauma and healing.
Informed by personal/familial history, years of research and travel, including visits to museums, memorials and the ruins of incarceration sites, these essays take us on both a physical and a metaphysical journey. What becomes increasingly clear are the infinite connections between the treatment of Japanese Americans and other forms of oppression, criminalization, dispossession, and state violence enacted by the United States, past, present, and ongoing.
Brandon Shimoda is a 2020 Whiting Fellow, and the author of books of poetry and prose, including the forthcoming The Afterlife is Letting Go (with City Lights, 2024), Hydra Medusa (Nightboat Books, 2023), The Grave on the Wall (City Lights, 2019), which received the PEN Open Book Award, and Evening Oracle (Letter Machine Editions, 2015), which received the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. He is also the co-editor of To look at the sea is to become what one is: An Etel Adnan Reader (Nightboat Books, 2014) and an anthology of poetry on WWII Nikkei incarceration (forthcoming from Haymarket Books in 2025). He currently lives in Colorado Springs and teaches at Colorado College.
Praise for the work of Brandon Shimoda
“The Afterlife Is Letting Go is a meditative consideration of Japanese American incarceration during WWII by Brandon Shimoda, author of the PEN Open Book Award-winning The Grave on the Wall.“
–Matt Seidel, Publishers Weekly’s “Big Indie Books of Fall 2024”
“Both personal and choral, The Afterlife is Letting Go is deeply felt, precise, and as generous in its insights as it is unsparing in its critiques of how ‘exclusion zones’ proliferate and reach across time and space. A stirring, trenchant, and necessary work.”
–Christina Sharpe, author of Ordinary Notes
Tsuru for Solidarity is a nonviolent, direct action project of Japanese American social justice advocates working to end detention sites and support front-line immigrant and refugee communities that are being targeted by racist, inhumane immigration policies. Tsuru for Solidarity stand on the moral authority of Japanese Americans who suffered the atrocities and legacy of U.S. concentration camps during WWII and they say, “Stop Repeating History!” To learn more about their mission visit their website at: https://tsuruforsolidarity.org/
Made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation