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Brynn Saito is the author of The Palace of Contemplating Departure, winner of the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award from Red Hen Press and finalist for the 2013 Northern California Book Award. Brynn co-authored, with Traci Brimhall, Bright Power, Dark Peace, a chapbook of poetry from Diode Editions (2013). Her work has been anthologized by Helen Vendler and Ishmael Reed; it has also appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Ninth Letter, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Pleiades. Brynn is the recipient of a Kundiman Asian American Poetry Fellowship, the Poets 11 award from the San Francisco Public Library, and the Key West Literary Seminar’s Scotti Merrill Memorial Award. Recently, Brynn served as the Kundiman Writer-in-Residence at Sierra Nevada College. Born and raised in Fresno, CA, Brynn currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Seeing from positions on a 360-degree angle, Brynn s surprise shifts in perspective can come sudden, from behind herself, describing the curve of her own spine, or from the eyes and sensibilities of stones witnessing construction of an internment camp, or from within an imaginary thought, a what if, a conversation with sky or ghosts, a bloody memory. Hers is a view from outside witnessing human experience of nature itself watching. These time-and space-expanding images, requiring the skill of well-wrought poetry poetry with a poetic stay with the reader, and merge with a greater emotional, philosophical, and spiritual meaning.Electric kaleidoscopic imagery, yet the center holds its intention/s. Wouldn t it be amazing to write like this. Judy Grahn Between worlds do it sometimes seem move the forces of an inconnotable world and so Brynn Saito s poems engage them on a level of narrative and lyric that be sometimes sorcerous, sometimes medicinal. The questions this book asks of its mythological and actual heroes are questions I want to know the answers to. Her own are brave sure, you can expect that much but they are also beautiful. As the poet reassures herself, Your spirit is a songstress / occupying the sea. Kazim Ali
