{"product_id":"coral-road-isbn-9780375712043","title":"Coral Road","description":"Garrett Hongo’s long-awaited third collection of poems is a beautiful, elegiac gathering of his Japanese-American ancestors in their Hawaiian landscape and a testament to the power of poetry, as it brings their marginalized yet heroic narratives into the realm of art.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eCoral Road \u003c\/i\u003eHongo explores the history of the impermanent homeland his ancestors found on the island of O‘ahu after their immigration from southern Japan, and meditates on the dramatic tales of the islands. In sumptuous narrative poems he takes up strands of family stories and what he calls “a long legacy of silence” about their experience as contract laborers along the North Shore of the island. In the opening sequence, he brings to life the story of his great-grandparents fleeing from one plantation to another, finding their way by moonlight along coral roads and railroad tracks. As his grandmother, a girl of ten with an infant on her back, traverses “twelve-score stands of cane \/ chittering like small birds, nocturnal harpies in the feral constancies of wind,” Hongo asks, “Where is the Virgil who might lead me through the shallow underworld of this history?” In fact, it is Hongo who guides himself—and us—as, in these devoted acts of recollection, he seeks to dispel the dislocation at the center of his legacy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe love of art—making beauty in however provisional a culture—has clearly been a guiding principle in Hongo’s poetry. In this content-rich verse, Hongo hearkens to and delivers “the luminous and the anecdotal,” bringing forth a complete aesthetic experience from the shards that make up a life.“In \u003ci\u003eCoral Road\u003c\/i\u003e the landscape of Hawaii and his family’s history in the islands become a stage for him to examine broader questions of diaspora, art, and legacy and realize the vision he had been honing in his life and writing. . . . In these extravagant poems, Hongo transforms his longings for home into a masterpiece of tribute and remembrance.” \u003cb\u003e—Teow Lim Gowh, \u003ci\u003eThe American Poetry Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“This is deep music, and clear, as the poet carries us to those places in the heart that ground and guide us. \u003ci\u003eCoral Road\u003c\/i\u003e: \u003ci\u003ePoems\u003c\/i\u003e by Garrett Hongo is the strongest book of poems this reviewer has seen in years.” \u003cb\u003e—Larry Smith, \u003ci\u003eNew York Journal of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Garrett Hongo’s long-awaited third collection of poems is a beautiful, elegiac gathering of his Japanese-American ancestors in their Hawaiian landscape and a testament to the power of poetry, as it brings their marginalized yet heroic narratives into the realm of art.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eIndieBound\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“All throughout \u003ci\u003eCoral Road\u003c\/i\u003e there is a capaciousness and generosity as well as ascrupulousness of vision that is extremely rare in contemporary American poetry.” \u003cb\u003e—Michael Collier, \u003ci\u003eOn the Seawall\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Lingering in every word is Hongo’s profound connection to and palpable homesicknessfor his family roots and childhood in Hawaii.” \u003cb\u003e—Christine Thomas, \u003ci\u003eHonolulu Star-Advertiser\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[\u003ci\u003eCoral Road\u003c\/i\u003e] is an intergenerational, multilayered, place-based search for home . . . Hongo sings from the graves of his people.” \u003cb\u003e—Derek Sheffield, \u003ci\u003eOrion\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“There is rage and beauty alike in Garrett Hongo’s long-awaited and sublimely romanticbook of poems, \u003ci\u003eCoral Road\u003c\/i\u003e. Hongo dramatically inhabits the Hawaiian pastand honors his ancestors, both familial and literary, in a rich, triumphant, and indeliblework of imagination.” \u003cb\u003e—Edward Hirsch\u003c\/b\u003eGarrett Hongo was born in Volcano, Hawai‘i, lived as a child in Kahuku on O‘ahu, and grew up thereafter in Los Angeles. He is the author of two previous collections of poetry, three anthologies, and \u003ci\u003eVolcano: A Memoir of Hawai‘i. \u003c\/i\u003eHis poems and essays have appeared in \u003ci\u003eThe Kenyon Review, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eVirginia Quarterly Review,\u003c\/i\u003e among others. He has been the recipient of several awards, including fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation. He lives in Eugene, Oregon, and teaches at the University of Oregon, where he is Distinguished Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences.\u003cb\u003eCoral Road \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I keep wanting to go back, across an ocean, blue-gray and uncaring,\u003cbr\u003e White cowlicks of waves at the continental shore, then the midsea combers\u003cbr\u003e Like white centipedes far below the jetliner that takes me there.\u003cbr\u003e And across time too, to 1919 and my ancestors fleeing Waialua Plantation,\u003cbr\u003e Trekking across the northern coast of O`ahu, that whole family\u003cbr\u003e                                                                                       of first Shigemitsu\u003cbr\u003e Walking in \u003ci\u003egeta\u003c\/i\u003e and sandals along railroad ties and old roads at night,\u003cbr\u003e Sleeping in the bushes by day, \u003ci\u003eha`alelehana\u003c\/i\u003e—runaways\u003cbr\u003e From the labor contract with Baldwin or American Factors.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e My grandmother, ten at the time, hauling an infant brother on her back,\u003cbr\u003e Said there was a white coral road in those days, pieces of crushed reef\u003cbr\u003e Poured like gravel over the brown dirt, and, at night, with the moon up,\u003cbr\u003e As it was those nights during their flight, silver shadows on the sea,\u003cbr\u003e It lit their path like a roadway made of dust from the Ocean of Clouds.\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eMichiyuki\u003c\/i\u003e is what they called it, the Moon Road from Waialua to Kahuku.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e There is little to tell and few enough to tell it to—\u003cbr\u003e A small circle of relatives gathered for reunion\u003cbr\u003e At some beach barbecue or Elks Club veranda in Waikiki\u003cbr\u003e All of us having survived that plantation sullenness\u003cbr\u003e And two generations of labor in the sugar fields,\u003cbr\u003e Having shed most all memory of travail and the shame of upbringing\u003cbr\u003e In the clapboard shotguns of ancestral poverty.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e                                                                          Who else would even listen?\u003cbr\u003e Where is the Virgil who might lead me through the shallow underworld of this history?\u003cbr\u003e And what demiurge can I say called to them, loveless ones,\u003cbr\u003e                through twelve-score stands of cane\u003cbr\u003e Chittering like small birds, nocturnal harpies in the feral constancies of wind?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e All is diffuse, like knowledge at dusk, a veiled shimmer in the sea\u003cbr\u003e As schools of baitfish boil and revolve in their iridescent globes,\u003cbr\u003e Turning to the olive dark and the drop-off back to depth below,\u003cbr\u003e Where they shiver like silver penitents—a cloud of thin, summer moths—\u003cbr\u003e While rains chill the air and pockmark the surface of the sands at Sans Souci,\u003cbr\u003e And we scatter back inside to a humble Chinese buffet and cool \u003ci\u003esushi\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Spread on Melamine platters on a starched white ribbon of shining cloth.","brand":"Knopf","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303817433317,"sku":"NP9780375712043","price":24.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375712043.jpg?v=1767724121","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/coral-road-isbn-9780375712043","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}