I Weave a Nest of Foil, Kelson Books
Reviews and Interview:
“The poems in this astonishing collection are utterly tender and completely peculiar. Lullabies sung by apparitions, they stroke and prickle at once with lush, precise langauge. In Naganawa’s work another world – uneasy, strange and beautiful – is superimposed on this one, and it is in the thin places that we encounter spirits and angels. But that world is no more surreal than ours: the neighborhood park during pandemic quarantine, aclassroom of children in a time of everyday mass shootings. The work is often ekphrastic and art-inspired, but equally informed by the human body, its tissues and fluids, its latticed, shiny scars. These poems are gorgeous and intriguing, each a lemon drop on the tongue: round, sharp, the color of sunshine, dissolving in spit and a lingering tingle of sweet and acid.”
— Sati Mookherjee, author of Eye and Ways of Being
Arlene Naganawa’s work appears in The Inflectionist Review, La Piccioletta Barca, Whale Road Review, Fatal Flaw, Thimble, Barnstorm, Belletrist, Crab Creek Review, Crab Orchard Review, Waxwing, Calyx, New Delta Review, Poetry on Buses, and in other publications.
Her chapbooks include Private Graveyard (Gribble Press),The Scarecrow Bride (Red Bird Chapbooks), The Ark and the Bear (Floating Bridge Press), and We Were Talking About When We Had Bodies (Ravenna Press).
Arlene has been the recipient of grants from the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture and Artist Trust and was awarded a creative residency at Bloedel Reserve on Bainbridge Island, WA, and served as a juror for the 2024 poetry residency.
Arlene has been a Writer in the Schools for Seattle Arts and lectures, instructor at Hugo House, poetry mentor and site lead for the Pongo Poetry Project at Judge Patricia H. Clark Children and Family Justice Center, and poetry teacher at Echo Glen Children’s Center in Snoqualmie, Washington.