Sunday Double Suicide by Goro Takano

After my wife’s funeral, I put into this backpack

Her Buddhist memorial tablet and carried it around

My son said to me: “The dead are far easier to carry

Than the living” --- every time I took out the tablet and put it back

Into the backpack, I felt as if I were a professional magician

(An excerpt from “Why Don’t We Meet Again A Hundred Years Later?”)

In my poetry, orderly chaos reigns. You will keep feeling countless lessons in love and solitude loom up through the mad torrent of myriad images in this book. I hope reading this book will somehow help you navigate your own way through everyday realities.
—Goro Takano

Born in the city of Hiroshima, Japan, Goro Takano is an associate professor in the Faculty of Medicine at Saga University, Japan, where he teaches English to Japanese medical students. His past poetry collections published through BlazeVOX are Responsibilities of the Obsessed (2013), Silent Whistle-Blowers (2015), and Non Sequitur Syndrome (2018). On Lost Sheep, Takano’s translation of the works of the Japanese modernist poet Shiro Murano, was published in 2017 through Tinfish (Honolulu). Takano’s first Japanese-only poetry collection Nichiyo-bi no Shinju (“Sunday Double Suicide”) and his second Japanese-only one Hyaku-nen Tattara Aimasho (“Why Don't We Meet Again A Hundred Years Later?”) were published through Karan-sha (Fukuoka, Japan) in 2019 and 2021, respectively.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 80 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-394-2