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Foreign
Wife Elegy
Reviews
Minneapolis Star Tribune:
"Rich with deceptively simple and profoundly touching poems."
Library Journal:
"Taniguchi's poems are fresh and original, and in the solitude that comes from marrying outside her culture, she has found a firm ground on which to make her new home."
Asian American Book Review:
"An honest, often searing, and generous commentary on how an individual copes with loneliness and detachment from one's own family and culture, and ultimately the triumph of compassion and hope over desperation, as seen in poignant portrayals of how her Japanese past interweaves with her present life in Midwestern America."
Altar Magazine:
"Taniguchi skillfully weaves Eastern and Western cultural figures and artistic forms, sometimes in a single poem, and her facility with language and imagery renders this shift seamless."
Splendid:
"For a first collection of poetry, Foreign Wife Elegy is most noteworthy for its polish and craftsmanship. [Taniguchi] creates an entire world of specific sensations and images out of a few wispy sentences—a truly remarkable gift."
Minnesota Magazine:
"Taniguchi's collection of poetry crosses many boundaries, finding beauty in disaster and quiet in tears. Intensely personal poems about small occurrences, about Taniguchi's husband's work with the dying at a hospital, and about the space between her Japanese childhood and her Midwestern adulthood fill Foreign Wife Elegy with emotion and reflection."
Minneapolis Observer:
"While the collection is powerful in its storytelling entirety, each poem is itself a complete experience."
Gathering of the Tribes:
"Although rather young (born in 1975), Ms. Taniguchi interestingly shows the definite qualities that belong to the long tradition of Japanese 'feminine' writing from the heian era's Sei Sho Nagon and Lady Murasaki."
Corresponder:
"In her impressive debut, Taniguchi mixes the surreal with the concrete, balances her elders and her husband, struggles to find her place in a foreign land, and juxtaposes the exoticness of the Far East with bleak Minnesota winters . . . These are nature poems that refuse to remain in the forest, family poems that cannot be confined to the pages of an album."
Lynette Reini-Grandell (KFAI), Minneapolis Observer:
"The entire collection is filled with loving, delicate poems musing on distance, language, and her husband's experience healing."
Ray Gonzalez:
"Yuko Taniguchi awakens the spirit of poetry as a global light that extends beyond what we know as individuals and what we yearn for beyond our lives. To have this book remind us what poetry can do is to travel beyond our familiar boundaries."
Juan Felipe Herrera:
"The body as voice, death as sound, music as cosmos, blood as word, color as spirit—Taniguchi shifts the categories, with a swift-wicked blade, with a piano-shaped bomb. Miraculous."
Gary Young:
"The poems in Yuko Taniguchi's Foreign Wife Elegy are a reverential testament to a world where life can feel 'like practice/for dying.' In Taniguchi's generous, deft hands, disaster is mediated by transfiguring beauty, and the relentless inevitability of death is balanced by acceptance and astonishing tenderness. Bathed in tears that honor both the splendor and the horrors of this world, her poems are not comforting, but they do console. In the poem 'Foreign Words,' Taniguchi's husband practices Japanese by repeating the word 'lovely, lovely, lovely.' He could well have been describing this book."
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