The first major poetry collection from an award-winning student of Robert Pinsky, exploring the inherited trauma within his Japanese American family, his life as an artist, and his bond with his wife
In 65 lyric poems organized into a triptych, Common Grace offers an important new lens into Asian American life, art, and love.
Part 1, “Soul Sauce,” describes the poet’s life as a practicing visual artist, taking us from an early encounter with an inkwell at Roseland Elementary in 1969 to his professional outdoor easel perched on Long Island Sound.
Part 2, ‘Ubasute,” is named after the mythical Japanese practice wherein “a grown son lifts / his aged mother on his back, / delivers her to a mountain, / leaves her to die.” This concept frames a wrenching portrayal of his parents’ decline and death, reaching back to his father’s time in the American internment camps of WWII and his mother’s memories of the firebombing of Tokyo. It also anchors the 2 outer parts in the racial trauma and joys passed down from his parents.
Part 3, “Gutter Trees,” gives us affecting love poems to his wife and the creative lives they’ve built together.
Ranging in scope from private moments to the sweep of familial heritage, Caycedo-Kimura’s poems are artful, subtle, but never quiet.
About the Series
Raised Voices is a poetry series established in 2021 to raise marginalized voices and perspectives, to publish poems that affirm progressive values and are accessible to a wide readership, and to celebrate poetry’s ability to access truth in a way that no other form can.
“Wry, tender, musical and unsentimental. . . . In these poems, the visible world radiates meaning, memory becomes palpable, and loss is acknowledged.”
—Robert Pinsky, 3-time United States Poet Laureate
“Common Grace is an uncommon book, elegant, at times tough-minded, also moving.”
—Ha Jin, National Book Award–winning author of Waiting
“Pays fluent loving attention to life and art—and their rewards glow!”
—Gail Mazur, author of Land’s End: New and Selected Poems
“Here is a poet of clear-eyed originality, big-hearted and wise—and a book to read again and again.”
—Matthew Thorburn, author of The Grace of Distance
“Announces Caycedo-Kimura as an important new voice.”
—Jennifer Franklin, author of No Small Gift
I. Soul Sauce
Family Anthem
Chopsticks
Cal Tjader
titling a poem
En Plein Air at Silver Sands State Park
Winter Psalm
Roseland Elementary, 1969
Sunflowers
Elegy for Mrs. Mullane
In the Studio
North on Route 101
daily news
La Sidrería
Taxi de Toledo
Duende
Misfortuned
Turning Forty-Nine
Fishboned
Cross My Heart, Hope to Die
Autumnal Equinox
dying
II. Ubasute
The Moon of Ubasute
Burial
Hand Tilling
Watching Grass Grow
Ride Home
The Miss Anita
Casting
Ritual
Screaming Crows
The Hardest Part
Moving On
Leaving
Artificial Flavors
Solidarity
Post-War Occupation
When You’re the Son
What’s Kept Alive
Mom Deciding
Hama
Delayed
Memorial
Tokyo Army Hospital, 1957
Afternoon Infusion
III. Gutter Trees
Nest
Five Minutes on High
Tripe Soup
Taste Test
On United Flight 2309
marking territory
Riff
Migration
Staircase
End of October
The Fern
Owl
Seasons
Common Grace
Away in Boston, Riding the Green Line
The Art of Shoveling Snow
New Year’s Day
Foraging, July 2020
If this were the day
humility
Gutter Trees
Acknowledgments
Notes
- “Bloomfield poet’s Common Grace captures Japanese American experience, inherited trauma,” Hartford Courant, interview
- “What’s Kept Alive,” Poetry Unbound/On Being, “What’s Kept Alive” narrated by Pádraig Ó Tuama
- “What’s Kept Alive,” Poetry Unbound/On Being, poem feature for “What’s Kept Alive”
- “When The Poet is a Master of Multiple Arts: Michelle Whittaker and Aaron Caycedo-Kimura; Interviews with Frances Richey,” Plume, interview
- “2022 Featured Fall Books List,” Academy of American Poets, included in roundup
- “A Portrait of the Life of the Artist as a Memoir in Poems,” Beacon Broadside, Q&A
- “What to Read When You've Made It Halfway Through 2022,” The Rumpus, included in 2022 book round-up