The Grave on the Wall

- Celebrated poet Brandon Shimoda's first memoir that deals directly with the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and its affect on memory and family. - Shimoda's poetry which routinely blends biographical writing has been praised by Publishers Weekly and Boston Review. - Shimoda won the William Carlos Williams Award in 2016. - A needed narrative in today's climate of normalized imprisonment of immigrants/immigrant families. - An unconventional travel narrative that is for anyone who seeks out literary nonfiction, including memoirs, that are nonlinear/diaristic/meditative/poetic/historical/political, in some cases nonfiction that reads like fiction. It is a remarkable exploration of how citizenship is forged by the brutal US imperial forces—through slave labor, forced detention, indiscriminate bombing, historical amnesia and wall. If someone asked me, Where are you from? I would answer, From The Grave on the Wall."—Don Mee Choi, author of Hardly War "Shimoda intercedes into the absences, gaps and interstices of the present and delves the presence of mystery. This mystery is part of each of us. Shimoda outlines that mystery in silence and silhouette, in objects left behind at site-specific travels to Japan and in the disparate facts of his grandpa’s FBI file. Gratitude to Brandon Shimoda for taking on the mystery which only literature accepts as the basic challenge."—Sesshu Foster, author of City of the Future "Shimoda is a mystic writer … He puts what breaches itself (always) onto the page, so that the act of writing becomes akin to paper-making: an attention to fibers, coagulation, texture and the water-fire mixtures that signal irreversible alteration or change. … he has written a book that touches the bottom of my own soul."—Bhanu Kapil, author of Ban en Banlieue "The Grave on the Wall is a passage of aching nostalgia and relentless assembly out of which something more important than objective truth is conjured—a ritual frisson, a veracity of spirit. I am grateful to have traveled along.”—Trisha Low, The Believer