Product Description
Part memoir, part Japanese American family chronicle, part luminous work of natural history, Volcano tells what happened when Hongo returned to his birthplace in Hawai'i, as a young man, to reclaim its dreamlike landscape and his own elusive past. A magnificant evocation of heritage and place. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Chasing Ghosts from an Invented Past
Hongo delights us with his poetic voice and I was expecting big things with this memoir.But doesn't a 'memoir' mean you've spent some meaningful time in a locale and are a bit of an expert on it?Hongo left Hawaii for California at a young age and knows little if anything about the history of the aina.His spiritual angle on looking at a leaf, stream, or hardened lava flow is somewhat interesting but the book lacks any meaningful punch because there is little or no characterization.I was expecting him to reconnect with people from his childhood but there are none.He is chasing ghosts from an invented past and the writing suffers for it.

Mislabled as a memoir of Hawaii, it's a spiritual odyssey
This enormously moving book is presented more as a natural history of a land, Hawaii, when it really is a history of one man's soul.Touchingly self revealing, it shares the torment and the ecstasy of one person'ssearch for meaning.I felt the natural history information, the eternaltree and the omnipresent volcano, were metaphors, not the meat of the book. I encourage readers on a personal path of understanding to take on VOLCANOas a guidebook of a singular journey - one that may resonate with many ofus.It is wonderful ... Read more

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Well-known writers such as Amy Tan join up-and-coming talents including Chang-rae Lee to speak about their personal experiences as Asian Americans, covering such issues as racism, generational differences, learning English, and education. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Unique cultural perspectives
I found this book at the library, and after reading it, hope to buy a copy to keep--something I rarely do. This is a collection of engaging first-person nonfiction stories by Asian-American writers. Anyone of western culture would be fascinated by these stories. I turned to Amy Tan's first, since she is a famous writer. But all of the stories are good (you can skip the introduction). They cover experiences of Americans whose ancestry is Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and more. A painful, though subtle, element to the book is understanding how a "caucasianing" process has happened to most of these people.

They are personal stories. If you like family drama, laugh-out-loud humor, and a good tearjerker, it is found in here. If you have thought of "Asian-Americans" as a single group of people, you will not after reading this. ... Read more

Product Description
Born in Volcano, Hawaii, Hongo's Japanese ancestry and schooling in California provide the materials for poems that are highly exotic, yet realistic. Winner of the 1987 Lamont Poetry Prize of the Academy of American Poets, the most distinguished poetry award in America. ... Read more

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Bring it back into print! Please!
Garrett Hongo, The River of Heaven (Knopf, 1988)

Hongo's second book of poetry was the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1987, an award which usually lends a great amount of buzz to a poet for a very short time. Hongo, unfortunately, is no expection, and not long after this book's release, he slid back into the relative obscurity afforded most of the country's top poets.

Hongo mostly writes in, and excels at, narrative form; a forgotten art in the Eliot-influenced American culture of the latter half of the twentieth century. Unlike most narrative poets, Hongo is willing to take the time to remember what poetry is while telling his story, and never lapsing into more prosaic sentence structure while still getting his points across. An example (I opened the book at random to pick it; seldom is a book of poetry good enough throughout to do that) from the middle of the poem "Morro Rock":

And I knew a girl once
who lived near there,
and whom I'd visit,
hitching north, needing her still.
She was the first I'd known
who could sit, oblivious,
still in her long shift,
pull both knees to her arms,
and rock gently in the sand
while a thin foam of sea washed around her.
I'd stand barefoot in the foam
while the ocean percolated around us,
and toss wet handfuls of sand
towards the combers, empty of feeling.
The Rock filled the space behind us.

There's not an unwritten rule of poetic creation not broken in that stanza, and yet Hongo pulls it off without, seemingly, any effort at all. Truly excellent stuff that should never have gone out of print. ... Read more

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A beautiful and moving collection of poetry by a new author. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Beautifully crafted imagistic narrative
I came across Garrett Hongo's poetry for the first time a few years when Greg Pape visited the creative writing class I teach, and "Yellow Light" (title poem from this book) is the one poem he brought with him for the students. "Yellow Light" is an anecdote about a woman coming after a long day, arms full of groceries, walking home in the evening yellow light, a tactic similar to Amy Lowell's study in whites. I subsequently bought the book, and found that all of Hongo's poems in this volume were very strong: filled with subtlety and nuance, creating whole narratives that also have portraits in them in the way that Imagist poets do, and providing the reader with dinstinct insights into the lives of ordinary people, like ones we meet and know everyday. Very rarely do I read poets who succeed in being complex yet comprehensible at the same time, and Garrett Honog succeeds in that. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (2)

Beautifully written!
Yamauchi is a great example for Asian women to follow.Her plays are always an inspiration.Since I saw And the Soul Shall Dance on stage, I've become a fan of hers.

all the same
This book is alright. I did enjoy reading it somewhat even though the stories all seemed to be the same after a while. Although it paints a clear picture of Japanese-Americna struggles, most stories end with the predictable outcome.I did not like the ending of most of the stories.Furthermore, I am unhappy with the skewing of the plays "And the Soul Shall Dance" and "The Music Lesson" by the short stories similar to them."Shirley Temple Hotcha-cha" is the best story in the book, offering a different end for Japanese-American women. ... Read more

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Chapters: Osborne Russell, Lawson Fusao Inada, Brenda Bakke, Diana Abu-Jaber, Garrett Hongo, Clinton Kelly, John Yeon, Leonard Levy, Molly Gloss, Harvey W. Scott, Blind Pilot, Kim Stafford, William G. T'vault, Thomas Condon, Elaine Miles, Frank C. High, William Overton, Chris Miller, Sho Yano, Jim Warren, William Keil, Debby Applegate, Louis Gerlinger, Sr., Sonny Sixkiller, George T. Gerlinger, Chief Comcomly, Greg Craven, George Lebreton, Hartwell B. Compson, Les Mcclaine, Carl Gerlinger, Robert D. Clark, Lewis Goldberg, Larry Crane, Chauncy Nye, Rozz Rezabek, Luther Cressman, Stephen Dow Beckham, Robert B. Pamplin, Jr., Thomas Nelson, William W. Page, Frederick Manson White, Henry F. Phillips, E. M. Page, Chromatic, William H. Gray, Meghan Kalkstein, John Burnett, Robert W. Lundeen, Terry Isaac, James A. Gibbs, Daniel H. Lownsdale, Whidden and Lewis, Mike Johnson, Steve Mason, Francis Pettygrove, Glenn Jackson, Blake Nelson, John Wesley Hillman, William Harsey, Jr., Blanche Bates, Joseph Millar, Barry Serafin, Mark Zusman, Rusty Nails, Esther Pohl Lovejoy, William M. Whidden, Vern Rutsala, James Cassidy, Dyrol Burleson, Juliet Wyers, Gabriel Franchère, Lauren Kessler, Raymond F. Rees, Rick Attig, Monica Drake, Irene Bennett Brown, Benjamin Lee Arnold, Chauncey Hosford, Martin D'aguilar, Ralph Friedman, Ion Lewis, Mike Forrester, Sophie Soong, Frederick Leadbetter, Bill Mcchesney, Curt Coleman, Martinez Heath, Lucy Fleck, Dan Wieden, Walter M. Walker, Eric M. Witchey, Doug Baldwin, Chris Oldham, Bob Welch, Irving W. Pratt, Bill Borcher, William Barlow, Hilda Grossman Morris, Jerome Alden, Thomas Joel Maloy, Baby Bunny Smith, Jan Vandertuin, Jacob Kamm, Frances Gabe, Hub Pernoll, Jim Elkins, Mary F. Sammons. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 261. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: O...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=10044951 ... Read more

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Word count: 1737. ... Read more