A review by tumblehawk
The Grave on the Wall by Brandon Shimoda

4.0

This heartbreaking and beautiful book asked so much of me! That’s not a complaint. Do you know what I mean? When a book demands your attention, demands to be read with such great care that you start to wonder if you’ve given some of your other books short shrift? Shimoda is a celebrated poet and though this memoir—about his paternal grandfather Midori—is presented as a memoir with the text arranged into sentences and paragraphs like prose, it is in a sense a book length poem. There are parts that read more plainly as he undergoes the exploration of facts but then the text will swerve into deeply poetic, associative thinking—I would have to put it down for a while, having stumbled into some dreamlike liminal state. The book is about so much more than Shimoda’s grandfather alone; it’s about the experience of being descended from immigrants in this country; it’s about the violence this country does to immigrants (Midori was jailed in an internment camp during WWII); and it’s about the violence this country does beyond its borders (the chapters on Hiroshima and Nagasaki will stay with me forever); and it’s about what it’s like reaching across borders in search of ancestry…both physical borders but also the borders of memory, of dream/reality, the borders between people. I am a fast reader but I had to take this one slowly and surely and I recommend you do the same. Beautiful book. I almost read it at the beginning of my residency but had a feeling it might psych me out on my own memoir edits and I’m glad I listened to that intuition—Shimoda is working on another level. Thanks to another wonderful poet, @dianagoldfish, for suggesting I read this.