Kewalo Blues and Echoes by Gary Pak

Gary Pak’s Kewalo Blues and Echoes reflects his profound, joyous, and critical grasp of Hawai’i as entangled site of local pidgin, Native Hawaiian, oceanic, and ethnic mores of world-dwelling and culture-making. His jazz pianist and blues skills as well as narrative tactics pervade the syllables, lines, and forms. It is a striking, moving, rangy, and deft collection of poetry.

—Rob Sean Wilson, author of When the Nikita Moon Rose and Waking in Seoul, teaches literature & creative writing at UC Santa Cruz.

In a sideways take on a fairy tale opening, Gary Pak writes, “It’s once in a wave bursting over black rocks / That a moment is captured, somewhere / Between telling and feeling.” Pak’s poems meditate on the moment of capture that is also release; like John Cage, he listens for “the lull between waves,” while celebrating their constant motion. Best known as a fiction writer who writes about characters who act in the world, Pak receives the world as it comes toward him in this first book of poems. Rather than write about fishing (the lure, the line, the throw, the catch), he writes about watching fishermen, even those who leave their lines for digital devices. It’s a deep form of patience, no matter that he proclaims his impatience. If you want to know how to feel joy in the world’s unfolding, the constancy of its surf, the nimble movement of a mind, read this book. Pak’s joy is tainted, yes, as is life in Hawai`i more generally, by fighter planes and tourists and rich outsiders on their yachts, but his meditative care offers us a lull that is not vacation but instead offers the clearest of perceptions.

—Susan M. Schultz, author of Meditations: December 2019-December 2020 and Lilith Walks

“the white-haired woman/Who sways her bait all night long”

“the fisherman [who] waits for a bonefish/While playing a game on his iPhone”

“Seaweed…Being free to form a fine romance with the elements”

“Hard salty wind [trying] to pull/The whiskers from my face”

With these and like images Gary Pak transports us to Kewalo Basin, a small harbor on the south side of O’ahu. Aided by his bicycle and pen, the poet leads us on a tour of his favorite spots, some prominent landmarks and others more obscure. Indeed he promises, “There is much/To see in the in-between/And the mixings thereafter.” The result is a wide-ranging kaleidoscope of loving observations and philosophical musings on surfers and crabs, bending bamboo and Japanese brides, hibachis and reverie.

—Wing Tek Lum, author of Expounding the Doubtful Points and The Nanking Massacre: Poems

Gary Pak has published six works of fiction, including Brothers Under a Same Sky and Borderless. He is a professor emeritus of English at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. This is his first book of poems.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 114 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-460-4

$18

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