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Hiromi Yoshida’s debut poetry chapbook, Icarus Burning, offers a tantalizing glimpse into the post-9/11 world of fallen icons, failed hook-ups, and burning pianos. Out of this ash heap, Icarus is resurrected as the signifier of fluctuating desire—"waxing toward the boiling point on the Hudson horizon." The American psyche’s Ground Zero museum scintillates, bursting open to showcase Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Gregory Corso, Patty Hearst, Norman Bates, Rosa Parks, and the Virgin Mary. They are the iconographic phantasmagoria presiding over the "nymphomaniacal caravan" of New York City’s subway commuters. Hiromi Yoshida’s radical lyricism gives them all poetic justice, and more.
About the author
HIROMI YOSHIDA, one of Bloomington's finest and most outspoken poets, is a finalist for the 2019 New Women's Voices Chapbook Competition for Icarus Burning. Her poems have been nominated for inclusion in the Sundress Best of the Net Anthology; selected for inclusion in the INverse Poetry Archive; and published in The Asian American Literary Review, Discover Nikkei, Gidra, Evergreen Review, and The Rain, Party, & Disaster Society. Hiromi repurposes Met Store catalogs, illuminated manuscript wall calendars, and Vanity Fair magazine issues, to create collage works with titles such as Exhibit A, Ménage-a-Trois, Jouissance, and The World after the Fall of Icarus. She also uses chopsticks to make scrambled eggs, and forks to eat cup ramen noodles at midnight.
