Jordan Nakamura’s poems are often rich and lush in imagery and in the movements of an intellectual mind, often rife with tension. In “Lychee Harvest,” the poem’s imagery is simultaneously rough skinned and sweet. The poem traffics in the language of downpours and hesitations at once. Nature, desire, and humility are conflated as the poem moves fluidly across and through these themes. By the end of the poem, the speaker is “ready / to obey,” but it’s unclear if the kneeling is to the speaker’s lover, desire, or nature. This unspecific nature of Nakamura’s poems is what opens them up to capaciousness and possibility. The poem “Mycol” has a Glück-like tone reminiscent of The Wild Iris, but the language here is richer, more sonically amplified, and velvety in diction. Finally, “New Union Dawns” navigates a landscape of awakening within a strange and surreal apocalyptic reality. We’re not sure where we are or what’s happening, but we can feel how “[e]verything is remarkable / and the street woke up with the worms.” These poems are active, alive, and bountiful, and represent an active mind in perpetual motion. Nature in these poems is the source, the guarded sweetness, and the subject of change and transformation.
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