Tokyo Butter: Poems (Hardcover)

by Thylias Moss (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
This eighth outing from MacArthur "genius" grant winner Moss (Slave Moth, 2004) is her most ambitious. Loosely organized around the idea of missing persons—Moss's friend Deirdre, dead in Italy; an abducted child named Cindy Song—these extended, long-lined, energetically digressive poems yearn to connect everything to everything else: "any surface revealed by delving is the outside/ of something also a gate and trapdoor." Carnival games of whack-a-mole, older women's wombs, space stations, dinosaur excavations and bioluminescent cabbage come together on a single page. African-American experience provides just one strand of what Moss calls her Limited Fork Poetics, her way of including everything: modes of inquiry proper to geology, biology, geography, physiology, theology and blasphemy all get extended hearings. Her title stands for the slippery nourishment of figurative language itself: "Peanut butter is a tributary of the Butter Nile fanning out." The long central poem "Deirdre: A Search Engine" includes contrapuntal moments of flat grief, of welcome understatement: "we say she's up there, but we go to the cemetery"; "without her being there, nothing is the way she would have wanted it." This anchor piece gives heft and clarity to what might otherwise feel overwhelming, establishing Moss as a creator with an unmistakable mind. (Oct.)
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From Booklist
Moss is a highly original poet of amplitude and verve, her poems at once cerebral and sensual. Circling the mystery of absence in her newest brimming collection--the disappearance of a stranger named Cindy Song and the death of her beloved cousin, Deirdre--Moss juggles a set of metamorphosing motifs to create breathtaking, funny, and scathing riffs on natural processes and human practices. Snow, glass, eggs, accidents, decay, mutations, saving face, head scarves, funnel cake, chromosomes, fruits, and flowers all inspire kinetic collages, with butter serving as a strange and poignant unifying substance. It is in "DEIDRE: A SEARCH ENGINE" that Moss' modus operandi comes clear. She is emulating a "Google odyssey," rendering lyrical the odd juxtapositions and eureka moments of Internet searching. But so organically ordered and so complex and hybridized are the shape-shifting, morally ordered mindscapes Moss engineers that they possess not a techno aura but, rather, a Hieronymus Bosch-like surrealism. "To live is to embrace the danger of rapture," writes Moss, and the same can be said of reading this fascinating and demanding creation. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 112 pages
• Publisher: Persea (December 15, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0892553197
• ISBN-13: 978-0892553198
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #594,368 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A work of utmost sincerity, January 4, 2007

By	Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

Whiting Writer's Award-winning author and professor of poetics (University of Michigan) Thylias Moss presents Tokyo Butter, a free-verse compilation of poetry written to help make sense of the death of her beloved cousin and friend, Deirdre. Tokyo Butter is far from an elegy or a memorial; reaching beyond traditional limitations, it seeks remnants of Deirdre's life, passion, and essence in news stories, arcane tidbits of science, balloon warfare, and Internet search engines, among other places. A work of utmost sincerity about the resonating impressions of humanity, Tokyo Butter is a one-of-a-kind tribute to character and genius. "The Culture of Reena and the Bear (Before the Bear: derived from a theory of gravy)": (The neckline and hem of Reena's gown / were trimmed with real hummingbirds / [just a few tiny pins in the outspread wings / - she could feel the racing unison / that the tiny hearts fell into] and actual orchids. / The beak closest to it tried to extract nectar / from the small cleft - the suprasternal notch - / at the bottom of her perfumed throat) // (Bees drew near; live jewels from the garden.)