PROPOSED ADDITIONS, by Donovan Kūhiō Colleps, has arrived!

To order our new book, go to http://tinfishpress.com/?projects=proposed-additions.
It's $14, printed at Obun in Honolulu. Thanks Vince Watabu, for your help, and all the baseball talk over the last few years!


Donovan Kūhiō Colleps constructs Proposed Additions out of many parts: a house blueprint; his grandfather’s cancer journal; the instructions to a pulmonary respirator; the story of a daddy sea horse; and an investigation of O‘ahu’s leeward side, its histories and its mo‘olelo. In this hybrid work—documentary poem, prose reflection, elegy—Colleps recovers his grandfather’s memory by way of the filing cabinet he left behind. As the poet carries the metal cabinet strapped to his back across the ‘Ewa plain, he recovers more than this intimate past. He also recovers significant cultural and linguistic histories of place in a part of Hawai‘i now being turned into fields of templated suburban houses.

from “Daddy Sea Horse”

I found him behind
the Appliances folder.
Daddy Sea Horse, preserved
like so many things aren’t.
In a dirty plastic
watch box tomb.
His perfect shape
a memory organ,
his dried skin
a dark yellow. Each
ridge of his spine
confirming the fractal
geometry of generations.

reason 3: sight & sound. the daddy sea horse is anchored to a plastic plant in the tank and people are yelling behind me. i do not understand the words being thrown but i see hands cutting the air in the glass reflection. my sister storms out with her naked children, and when the front door slams, daddy sea horse explodes. i do not count his babies because there are too many. a desire to make a shaka in the water overwhelms me. but it passes.

I brought him
to the dining table
to Ma.
“Here,” I said, “here.”
Standing in the spot
where I swear
it all happened,
and placed the box
in front of her.
“Where dis came from den?”
The hole in daddy sea
horse’s belly was
still there cavernous, and
he was leaning
against the clear side
of his container, staring
out at the empty
plate of sausages.
“Nana bought dat,”
she said,
“long time ago,
probly
from one adoze
touris-tee stoas


Donovan Kūhiō Colleps was born in Honolulu and lives in Pu‘uloa, ‘Ewa, on the island of O‘ahu. He is currently working toward a PhD in English at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, focusing on creative writing and Pacific literatures.

If you find Donovan's book compelling, try other Tinfish titles. Books about place include Kaia Sand's Remember to Wave, Barbara Jane Reyes's Poeta en San Francisco, and Craig Santos Perez's from unincorporated territory [hacha]. Hawai`i authors include Steve Shrader, J. Vera Lee, Lee A. Tonouchi, Lisa Linn Kanae, and the many authors of Jack London is Dead. Books of documentary poetry include jai arun ravine's and then entwine. Elizabeth Soto's book, Eulogies, complements Donovan's elegy to his grandfather. And so on. It's a weave, a lei, a labor of love.

"Thinking like an Asian": an interview on Jee Yoon Lee's blog

The cognitive hiccup involved in seeing that title and my face (photo by Anne Kennedy) together is part of what Tinfish is about, so I'm very pleased to be here. Joon-Young's sister, J. Vera Lee, is author of 2013's second book, Diary of Use.

So have a look at the interview, and also at Jee Yoon's blog more generally.

Synchronicity: Meadville, Pennsylvania is everywhere

[Bridge on the Allegheny College campus]

The second volume of my Dementia Blog, "She's Welcome to Her Disease," (Singing Horse Press) is off to the printer today, after several computer pratfalls.  First, this book about Alzheimer's disappeared from the publisher's computer and had to be re-designed.  Then, the version that I proofed seemed not to be corrected, although there was a corrected version on his computer. The book itself seemed to have acquired the disease.

My mother was born in Meadville, Pennsylvania; she lived in Canton, Ohio as a child, but returned to Meadville to attend and then graduate from Allegheny College (class of '39). When I google the town, I find that there are just over 13,500 residents. I hardly ever thought about Meadville until recently, even though my mother gave faithfully to her college every year during my childhood and received their alumni magazine.  I have early childhood memories of visiting Meadville and seeing the bridge on the college campus (above). The father of a college friend of mine, it turned out, had gone to Allegheny with my mother.  But still, not much about Meadville, even if I did drive through the town in graduate school with a boyfriend on the way to visiting Garrettsville, Ohio, where Hart Crane grew up, and was promptly forgotten. That changed shortly after my mother died. The lawyer who helped me with Tinfish's non-profit status, which dragged on for a while in the mid-2000s, introduced me to a new friend of hers, someone who had moved to Honolulu recently, someone whose daughter knew her son. We met at Starbucks. Vera Lee, as she turned out to be, is a poet and novelist. After our mutual friend, Melissa, left the cafe, I asked Vera where she grew up.  She told me I wouldn't have heard of the small town in Pennsylvania, that there was a small college there.  Meadville!  (Vera's first book of poems is just out this week from Tinfish, by the way.)

Since then, Vera and I have found out that one of my colleagues, also someone she knows by way of her son's basketball league, had a mentor in Meadville.  Then Vera met someone from Meadville who is renting a house in Mānoa Valley. And today, when a former colleague of mine wrote to ask if J. Vera Lee might be a former student of his, by name of Julia, I responded that no, she was not, but there was a story in there about how I met Vera.

His response? To my "further astonishment," he wrote, he had lived for four years in Meadville, and attended Meadville High School in the early 1950s.

My mother's brother and mother lived in Wooster, Ohio until they died many decades ago.  In my mother's dementia, she once called to say she was in Afghanistan and needed a ride to Wooster to see "Joe and Mother." On another occasion, perhaps, I'll write about the ways in which Wooster has been entering my life lately . . .