Six Tanka

Shizuka Omori was born in Okayama City in 1989. She is the author of three tanka collections: Burning the Palm of a Hand (2013), Camille (2018), and most recently, Hectare (2022), which won the Tsukamoto Kunio Award. Omori has received numerous awards and is recognized as one of the leading tanka poets of her generation. She lives in Kyoto and serves as an editor for Tō, a longstanding tanka journal.

Yuki Tanaka’s debut poetry collection, Chronicle of Drifting, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in April 2025. He has cotranslated, with Mary Jo Bang, A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi, published by Princeton University Press. He lives in Tokyo and teaches at Hosei University.