The Last Incantations: Poems

The personal, historical, and artistic are all in dialogue in David Mura’s daring collection, The Last Incantations. In a variety of poetic modes, Mura harmonizes and contrasts multiple voices to form a powerful meditation. Certain poems speak from his experiences as a third-generation Japanese American and his family’s struggles to prove their "Americanness." Others speak from the intersections of our multiracial society—an Asian teenager in love with a Somali Muslim girl, an apostrophe to Richard Pryor, poems about a Palestinian American friend, Abu Ghraib, the hapa sculptor Isamu Noguchi. The result is a sustained multifoliate poetry, bursting with elegance, heartache, and truth.