Publisher's Synopsis
Poetry. Many white (or, as this anthology calls them, Euro-American) poets have made Hawai'i home, either permanently or for a significant portion of their lives. But in a place marked by communities of writers marked as Local or Asian or Indigenous, there is no such community of Euro-American writers. Euro-American poetry seems to exist at two poles, either as the writing still to be resisted by non-white writers, or as work that comes from somewhere else, and is thus not relevant to Hawai'i's literature. This anthology features seventeen writers of poetry (and some prose), as well as their statements about being a Euro-American writer in Hawai'i. It looks at what happens after Euro-American literature has been de-centered, de-canonized. JACK LONDON IS DEAD presents writers whose work has been deeply influenced by Hawai'i, and whose poetry adds valuable voices to a complicated mix of ethnic cultures. Featured in this volume are the more experimental of the myriad Euro-American voices among Hawai'i's many exciting writers.
Contributors: Scott Abels, Diana Aehegma, Margo Berdeshevsky, Jim Chapson, M. Thomas Gammarino, Shantel Grace, Jaimie Gusman, Endi Bogue Hartigan, Anne Kennedy, Tyler McMahon, Evan Nagle, Janna Plant, Susan M. Schultz, Eric Paul Schaffer, Julia Wieting, Rob Wilson, and Meg Withers.
To contested questions of agency and authenticity in contemporary Hawai'i, this collection makes an important contribution. By clearing a public space for White authors to think (and write) through issues of a positionality compromised by the ruptures of historical violence and present day colonialism, editor Susan M. Schultz has done a brave thing. There are those who will object to this project by challenging the right of non-Indigenous 'others' to write about Hawai'i . However, the sensitivity of featured authors to the complex instability of their own standing as White writers in Hawai'i offers a nuanced, layered response to that call of challenge. Without closing our eyes to history, without denying any legacy of oppression or cooptation, and as citizens of the 21st century with so much at stake for a shared planet, it seems to me that this conversation may be one of the most important and difficult, yes, but necessary ones before us.--Caroline Sinavaiana, author of ALCHEMIES OF DISTANCE and co-author of MOHAWK/SAMOA: TRANSMIGRATIONS
