In flowing free-verse poems, a 15-year-old white American girl
who grew up in Japan recounts a kaleidoscope of devastations,
recoveries and irreparable damage—ranging from the geopolitical
to the personal. Emma’s lived in Japan since infancy. When her
family moves to Massachusetts for her mother’s breast-cancer
treatment, Emma starts getting migraines. She hates “abandoning
Japan” just months after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake/tsunami; she
wants to continue helping her friend Madoka’s relatives shovel
sludge from their drowned houses and wait for word of a missing
aunt. Japan’s “endless stretches of mangled homes / the tangled
mountains of debris / and all the broken towns and families”
feel like Emma’s own. In Massachusetts, “I don’t know when to
say what / I don’t know if something’s funny or not.” She writes
a poem: “Lonely is / when the language outside / isn’t the
language inside.” As Emma volunteers, helping a physically
disabled adult write poetry, and meets a multigenerational
Cambodian community with K