The Girl Without Arms

The Girl Without Arms is a figure in Japanese folklore-a young girl whose arms are lopped off by her father, and is left to die in the mountains. The father, at the behest of his evil wife-the girl's stepmother-lures the girl into the mountains at the promise of attending a neighboring festival. This is only the beginning of the tale. The poems of Brandon Shimoda's The Girl Without Arms are birthed of the rainy shut-in pause between steps forward and back in a season of great floods. In successive and interlocked sequences, these poems grapple with a seemingly unbridgeable confusion-related to love, the impossibility of life outside of love, and the unbearableness of life within it-as a way to give shape to the dark weather that permeates our lives, so as not to drown at its coming.