Francesca Preston reviews
GLYPH by Naoko Fujimoto

I do not know if I will ever descend through all the layers of Naoko Fujimoto's GLYPH. It's not to 'read' these poems but to climb down staircases into them, holding the book in my hand and turning it as I go in, physically, through torn and cut layers of words, paper and cloth, drawings of humans and memories, musical notes. Ancestors arise, and unanswerable questions. Wounds, and plants used to heal. Fujimoto's graphic poems hold domestic tools: scissors, forks, vegetable peelers, vacuums. And they also hold planets, the universe in and out of war, atomic bomb flowers. There is a ladder; shall I climb up? The more I look, the more I see.

Tonight, when cosmic dust falls
                                     into Jupiter, I open my mother’s last bottle

These words have been transported from an earlier version of “Japanese Apricot Wine” (Where I Was Born, Willow Books), not only rearranged but given life among images, an invitation to the senses and the viewer’s collaboration. To experience the poem in GLYPH is to feel its expansion, its multi-dimensional breathing. Like plants that leaf out even if you cut them, these poems keep growing.

Naoko Fujimoto was born and raised in Nagoya, Japan. She studied at Nanzan Junior College and received BA and Master’s degrees from Indiana University. Her poetry collections include Where I Was Born (Willow Books 2019), and three chapbooks: Mother Said, I Want Your Pain (Backbone Press 2018), Silver Seasons of Heartache (Glass Lyre Press 2017), and Home, No Home(Educe Press 2016). naokofujimoto.com

Francesca Preston is a writer and visual artist based in Petaluma, California. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Fence, Phoebe, Crab Creek Review, Stonecoast Review, Feral: A Journal of Literature and Art, Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press, and RHINO. The chapbook If There Are Horns is available from Finishing Line Press, and her microchap This Was Like I Said All Gone is part of Ghost City Press' 2022 Summer Series. Her essay on poetic craft appears in Naoko Fujimoto's Working on Gallery. francescapreston.com.