Icarus Burning

Hiromi Yoshida’s debut poetry chapbook, Icarus Burning, offers a tantalizing glimpse into the post-9/11 world of fallen icons, failed hook-ups, and burning pianos. Out of this ash heap, Icarus is resurrected as the signifier of fluctuating desire—“waxing toward the boiling point on the Hudson horizon.” The American psyche’s Ground Zero museum scintillates, bursting open to showcase Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Gregory Corso, Patty Hearst, Norman Bates, Rosa Parks, and the Virgin Mary. They are the iconographic phantasmagoria presiding over the “nymphomaniacal caravan” of New York City’s subway commuters. Hiromi Yoshida’s radical lyricism gives them all poetic justice, and more.