Seize, Brian Komei Dempster’s follow-up to Topaz, spares no one the highs and lows of fatherhood. The speaker struggles to care for his young and ailing child — a child whose many medical problems create an obstacle course of moral and emotional dilemmas. How does a father come to terms with the large and unknowable mysteries of a child who cannot communicate in a “normative” way? How does a parent — especially one who is dependent on language — guide a child without the use of speech? And how does one become the parent of another when their own uncertainties, their own wounds — intergenerationally from war, from strained race relations, from constantly being denied a place to belong — are still healing?

Brian Komei Dempster is an award-winning poet, editor, and teacher. His volumes of poetry, Seize (Four Way Books, 2020) and Topaz (Four Way Books, 2013), have received several honors, including the Julie Suk Award, an NCPA Gold Award in Poetry, and a Human Relations Indie Book Silver Winner award. He is the editor of From Our Side of the Fence: Growing Up in America’s Concentration Camps (Kearny Street Workshop, 2001), which received a Nisei Voices Award from the National Japanese American Historical Society, and Making Home from War: Stories of Japanese American Exile and Resettlement (Heyday, 2011). Dempster is a professor of rhetoric and language and Director of Administration for the Master’s in Asia Pacific Studies program at the University of San Francisco, where he was a recipient of the Dean’s Scholar Award and Distinguished Teaching Award. In addition, he teaches for the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference. He is a Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry.