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Arlene Naganawa
she/her
Poet
Arlene Naganawa's chapbooks include Private Graveyard (Gribble Press), The Scarecrow Bride (Red Bird Chapbooks), The Ark and the Bear (Floating Bridge Press), and We Were Talking About When We Had Bodies (Ravenna Press, Triple Series). Arlene is a past recipient of City of Seattle Artist and Artist Trust grants. She has worked with Pongo Poetry Project mentoring incarcerated youth and was a Writer in the Schools with Seattle Arts and Lectures and a Scribes instructor for Hugo House.
About Their Work:
Here’s an untruth in Arlene Naganawa’s book “I Leave a Nest of Foil”: “No one praises the ordinary.” In fact, Naganawa does, seemingly without effort and with subtle skill. Or maybe its fairer to say she’s right: the ordinary moments of life Naganawa evokes exist alongside those the poet remembers and those she imagines, all transmuted into something extraordinary by Naganawa’s lucent imagery. Daily life, biography and history sit at these poems as honored guests, but the lyrical richness that surrounds them changes the occasion of the poems’ celebration, flooding the poem with surges of dream. We end up in a different place and in a different mental space than we expected, a grander place and space made of language that is beautiful and precise.
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Website(s):
Books (for purchase):
I Weave a Nest of Foil (Kelson Books)
Online Work:
Check out her online portfolio
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