shima

Finalist for the 2025 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize • Shortlisted for the 2024 City of Victoria Butler Book Prize • Shortlisted for the 2025 Raymond Souster Award • Longlisted for the 2025 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award

“Reading shima through my own decolonial desire, I too am left in awe. . . . shō offers us a poetic transcription of a journey to ‘listen intently,’ not only to the ‘lilting rhythms’ of experiences endured by one’s ancestors, but also to the dangers of an unconditional, ‘sun-soaked’ nostalgia that can mask ongoing violence. In many ways, shima feels like an act of catch-and-release from the ‘confines of lineage,’ even as it continues to search for what may be impossible to find. Amidst this impossibility, I am breathless as I read.”
—Mira Shimabukuro, International Examiner

“In an inquisitive and dreamy debut, Yamagushiku wades into the waters of collective memory and displacement. What kind of understanding is possible between those exiled and those left behind, between diaspora and home, between ancestors and descendants? The poet remarks, ‘you are never undertaken all at once and never once and for all,” delicately braiding what is unknowable with what can be felt, connected and remembered.”
—2025 Raymond Souster Award Jury

“The speaker of these poems, of Okinawan heritage, longs to break from the world of his past, even though he is ‘a continent away.’ As in memory and dream, glimpses of his life merge with the lives of ancestors: mushroom cloud, the pounding of cane, grandmother’s white wings. The experience of reading shima is fluid, the boundaries of form and line dissolving. Poems in squat squares suggest the concrete structures of American military occupation. Some poems take the shape of seashell spirals, perhaps the pathways of fisherwomen. And at times, in the breaking waves of this extraordinary collection, there is ‘a slivering chance/ to be reborn.'”
—The 2024 City of Victoria Butler Book Prize jury

“Within the slip-leak-sputter of shō yamagushiku’s shima a familiar vocabulary for life, spirit, and searching ripples away from the page, ‘reborn as a sick fish with strange fins.’ Each scale sheens with mirror-worlds that break when asked, ‘Aren’t you tired?’ To swim with this bioluminescence is to learn to sit with failure, of inherited habits of violence that no known ritual can shake, except the half-dreamed one a poet chances upon in silence, in letting go. shima is a ‘clearing full of presence’ for the music of one’s body, memory, and history. The most skeptical and faithless part of me turned with awe.”
—Jane Shi, author of Leaving Chang’e on Read

“What do you call the act of witnessing, in real time, the movement of a person in the process of liberating themselves from the ruins and the roots of the past by transforming, or being transformed, into the embodiment of an entirely new, self-flourishing ecosystem? Testifying? Empowering? Dis-empiring? Reading? I don’t know that I read shō yamagushiku’s shima so much as I become sensitized to and botanized by its forms of resistance and hard-won revelations. I cannot explain or express, really, what this work means to me. It is meaning, a reintegration of the future, and, in poetry, my chosen family.”
—Brandon Shimoda, author of Hydra Medusa

“This remarkable debut reads like a compressed epic, each line attuned to its place within the poem, but also to the sweep of the composition. As one page turns to the next, centuries and continents shift and families thin and thread into new communities. The poems leave fragments of history in their wake, which we collect and just as we feel them cohering into a whole, everything recedes like a dream.”
—Kaie Kellough, author of Magnetic Equator

“Stunning, lyrical. . . . Many of [yamagushiku’s] poems capture the ferocity and beauty of movement in the natural world as a way to pay homage to his ancestral home. . . . whether it’s whirlpools in the oceans or the raging precipitation of a typhoon. As you come across these poems in the collection, you’re forced to shift with the poem, moving your body as if on the same journey as the elements themselves.”
—Victoria Buzz