Mariko Nagai's _Dust of Eden_

The Plot: Markio Nagai's verse novel Dust of Eden (2014) takes place between 1941 to 1945 and focuses on the experiences of thirteen-year-old Mina Masako Tagawa and her Japanese American family as they are forced from their home in Seattle and relocated to an internment camp in Idaho after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Amidst increasing discrimination in their town, Mina's father is imprisoned, and her family is then placed on a bus with only two pieces of luggage each to Camp Harmony in Puyallup, Washington. After four months, her family must travel again by train to Minidoka Relocation Center in Hunt, Idaho where they live for three years. Throughout the narrative, Mina struggles with her identity and experience of living as a Japanese American during a tumultuous time in US history. Her grandfather and father practice "the stoic Japanese principle known as gaman, which means to bear hardship silently" (122), while her eighteen-year-old brother Nick expresses his anger and frustration at the unfair treatment of Japanese Americans by the US government and eventually volunteers to join the Japanese American regiment in the US military to prove his loyalty to his country. Throughout the narrative, Mina expresses sadness and longing for the way her life used to be; she misses her home, her cat Basho, her best friend Jamie, and her family being together and happy.

The Poetry: The free verse poems in Dust of Eden utilize a variety of poetic techniques and formal approaches to express Mina's story. Some of the most prevalent features of Nagai's collection are the use of imagery, anaphora, lyricism, and metaphor. Each of these features in the poem "October 1942":

Dust enters

during the night like a thief,

leaving mounds 

of sand in all corners

of the room where the wind left it,

leaving mounds like graves,

even on top of us, burying us

while we were asleep.

Dust enters through our noses

and mouths while we are asleep (53).

In this poem and many others in the collection, Nagai uses space and symbol to illustrate the hopelessness and grief experienced by those interned in the camps during World War II. Poems like "September 1942" utilize space and movement on the page to depict mundane every-day experiences of internment such as the way in which internees were forced to stand in "line after line" while imprisoned (51), while other spare poems like "July 1945" disclose the horrors of internment: "A woman killed her baby / today because she was / afraid of leaving the camp" (114).

The Page: Nagai's verse novel is divided into five sections each focused on place; each poem is titled with the month and the year to give the collection a diary or journal-like quality. In addition to free verse poems, Dust of Eden also presents Mina's experiences through letters to and from Mina and essays written by Mina for school. This approach contributes to the layered and assembled nature of the verse novel as a work that contains not just lyric poetry but also documents and correspondences.

I found the narrative of Nagai's Dust of Eden fascinating and affecting, and the poetry beautifully and uniquely crafted. I give Dust of Eden four stars and highly recommend it.

Eileen Spinelli's _Another Day as Emily_

The Plot: Eileen Spinelli's Another Day as Emily (2014) tells the story of 12-year-old Suzy's summer. The narrative begins with Suzy's younger brother being hailed as a hero by neighbors and the local news for calling 911 after their elderly next-door neighbor takes a fall. Suzy begins to feel neglected and overlooked after this incident and the several that follow: she feels her mother pays more attention to her 4-year-old brother, she doesn't get cast in a play she auditions for, and she has to miss a special birthday baseball game with her father when her brother gets lost. Suzy, in the midst of her summer project on everyday life in the 1800s, decides to emulate the poet Emily Dickinson's "life of solitude." She asks her family and friends to call her Emily, she wears only white dresses, she refuses visitors and outings, and makes a list of Emily-approved activities (including writing letters and poems, playing piano, baking, reading, making breakfast, washing dishes, dusting, gardening, playing with the dog, listening to crickets, and caring for sick family members). The most interesting aspects in Spinelli's unnecessarily long verse novel is the character's fascination with Dickinson, but we don't get to this part until almost 100 pages into the narrative and even then it isn't fully developed. There are multiple pieces of disconnected narratives (her grandmother in Arizona is ill, her neighbor boy who has an alcoholic father is accused of stealing, and so on) that don't lead anywhere and ultimately make the book tedious and uninteresting at points.

The Poetry: The most disappointing thing about Another Day as Emily was the lack of poetic technique or form throughout in a book that is inspired by Emily Dickinson. The book is filled with short free verse poems. The poems come one after another on the same page eliminating the space that appears in most verse novels and collections of poetry, and these blank spaces are filled by Joanne Lew-Vritethoff's pencil illustrations that appear sporadically in the margins. There isn't much attention to line, which would be fine, but the book also lacks attention to space, lyric, image, and anything else that might distinguish it as falling within any poetic tradition. Even poems that draw directly from and quote Dickinson fall flat, like "Hope" which includes the first stanza of Dickinson's "Hope is a thing with feathers":

I chose this one

because I've been

feeling grumpy lately.

But now I'm not.

Now I've got hope

perching in my soul (128).

The Page: Spinelli's verse novel is ultimately a missed opportunity for a writer and her protagonist to use the verse novel form and a tradition of American poetry as inspiration. Suzy only attempts to write two poems in the 224 page narrative, and both depict her as being apathetic and bored by poetry although she is an avid reader and lover of books.

I give Another Day as Emily one star.