Coral Road

With anguish and love, Pulitzer Prize finalist Hongo (The River of Heaven) presents his ancestors' stories as they unfolded on the island of Oahu, their first homeland after they migrated from Japan. Hongo here sees poetry as a meditation, and he touches on everything from nature, personal experience, and myth to his ancestors' experiences of love and survival. To a great extent, he relies on narrative, with meaning emanating from the constant stream of places, colors, names, and anecdotes he cites. But Hongo's lively images and fluid tone prevent the reportorial style from slipping into passive documentation, and his language embodies the local as a way of connecting with the vast outside world: "When you see the blue sky that one day in Istanbul, Nazim/ How can you lie down on the ground and look up to it/ In respectful devotion to its full immensity."