An Electric Literature "Most Anticipated Poetry Book of 2021"
From the intersection of Onondaga, Japanese, Cuban, and Appalachian
cultures, Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley's newest collection arrives
brimming with personal and political histories.
"'You tell me how I was born what I am, '" demands Naka-Hasebe
Kingsley--of himself, of the reader, of the world. The poems of Dēmos:
An American Multitude seek answers in the Haudenosaunee story of The
Lake and Her children; in the scope of a .243 aimed at a pregnant doe;
in the Dōgen poem jotted on a napkin by his obaasan; in a flag burning
in a church parking lot. Here, Naka-Hasebe Kingsley places multiracial
displacement, bridging disparate experiences with taut, percussive
language that will leave readers breathless.
With astonishing formal range, Dēmos also documents the intolerance
that dominates American society. What can we learn from mapping the
genealogy of a violent and loud collective? How deeply do anger,
violence, and oppression run in the blood? From adapted Punnett squares
to Biblical epigraphs to the ghastly comment section of a local news
website, Dēmos diagrams surviving America as an other-ed American--and
it refuses to flinch from the forces that would see that multitude
erased.
Dēmos is a resonant proclamation of identity and endurance from one of
the most intriguing new voices in American letters--a voice singing
"long on America as One / body but many parts."
