news | Monday March 16, 2015

Rebuild and then Get Out

In advance of Sachiko Murakami’s forthcoming collection of poetry, Get Me Out of Here (Spring 2015), a review of her previous book, Rebuild, has just been published in The Fiddlehead. The reviewer, Allison LaSorda, calls Rebuild

a unique and thoughtfully crafted book. … In her varied constructions, Murakami replicates the idea of physical building and demolishing – adding a line to represent a floor or storey, replacing or rearranging letters within words — which achieves a feeling of odd familiarity and yet, a feeling of displacement; I imagine this effect walking down a known city street and being overwhelmed with a sense of alienation – the rapid turnover of rental units and sudden crop-ups of condos and monster-mansions serving as inspirations to many of her pieces.

Read the full review on pages 109–11 of the Winter 2015 issue of The Fiddlehead magazine (no. 262).

Also see this excellent interview of Murakami, published today on Jacket2, in which she elucidates the processes involved in the creation of Rebuild and give some insight into her latest project, Get Me Out of Here:

I’m more and more interested in collaboration and community-built writing. My new book, Get Me Out Of Here, consists of poems entirely written in response to observations other people made in airports. I had tried to write a book about airports, you see, as I was travelling a lot in 2012–13, but whenever I got into an airport I immediately spent the entire time waiting to leave – and forgot to look up and around and gather inspiration like a good poet. So I outsourced my inspiration. I made an open call on the Internet via social media and asked people to send me what they observed in airports. I spent the next few years writing poems in response to each observation. That was tougher than I thought it would be, but it was a very pleasant challenge. After writing a poem, I’d invite the observer in as an editor to further the collaboration. Then of course there were the usual collaborations in the course of writing a book: feedback from friends … , feedback from my editor Stephen Collis, and then Greg Gibson and Ann-Marie Metten went above and beyond copyediting the book at Talon. So the book that resulted is very much the result of collaboration.

Read more in the full interview online, and watch for Get Me Out of Here in April 2015.