Shoshana Olidort Reviews Lee Ann Roripaugh's tsunami vs. the fukushima 50

Visit LARB to learn about the South Dakota poet laureate's latest collection, published by Milkweed Editions. With some context, Olidort's review begins, "If, like me, you have become inured to the constant barrage of bad news, you may, like me, have forgotten all about the Tsunami of 2011, forgotten that it was unleashed by a 9.1 magnitude earthquake off the Pacific coast of Tōhoku in Japan, that it caused damage to nuclear reactors in the area, that it set off a chain reaction whose ramifications are still ongoing." More: 

And while you can of course revisit these events on Wikipedia or any number of websites, you’re unlikely to come by an account of the Tsunami’s ontology, its origins or dreams. For this, you’ll want to turn to tsunami vs. the fukushima 50, a new collection of poems by Lee Ann Roripaugh dedicated to the events of March 11, 2011, and their aftermath.

In poems like “beautiful tsunami” and “emo tsunami,” Roripaugh reimagines the tsunami itself as something between human and monster, a feral, female goddess, a

cobra come uncharmed
glittering rush
of fanged lightning
that strikes
and strikes again.

Other poems are written from the perspectives of victims and survivors, among them the Fukushima 50, employees of one of the damaged nuclear plants who remained on-site long after others had been evacuated. In “miki endo as flint marko (a.k.a. sandman),” we encounter the disembodied voice of the 24-year-old woman credited with saving many lives by tirelessly broadcasting warnings from her station at City Hall, an act for which she ultimately paid with her life: “after the tsunami took me / I was both here and not here // I mean I was everywhere / but also nowhere all at once.” The poem reads like a kind of mystical incantation, and the otherworldly speaker asks: “does this seem strange to you? // it used to seem strange to me/ but now it’s just how things are.”

Continue at LARB.