Review of Brandon Shimoda's The Alps and The Inland Sea

In the new issue of Harp & Altar, Jered White reviews TSky Press author Brandon Shimoda's books, The Alps and The Inland Sea.

"It may be helpful to see the two books not as distinct projects, but rather as complementary angles on the same subject, the same interior/exterior geography with its troubles and anxieties. As the trinity bomb haunts the speaker in The Alps, the radioactive specter of the bomb casts a similar plume of destruction over The Inland Sea as well, with... Read More its language of horrible “flash burn” followed by “flame.” The speaker imagines himself as subject and product of violence and atrocity done to and by the body: “The guards found me wrapped / in a bladder / seized with the enormity of flesh / spoiling / trigone—ureter, urethra and bulwark.” Every vista, from the vast to the quantum, becomes an insistent, unyielding self-portrait: “Inside of the nucleus of the Atomium / every surface is / a mirror I see my family in // though I never learned any of their names”." [Read the full review here]

And then run out and buy one of the last copies of The Inland Sea.