Mother Tongue Publishing Limited

Matsuki Masutani

I will be more myself in the next world

Winner of the Canada-Japan Literary Award
Short-listed for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award
Long-listed for the Fred Cogswell Prize for Excellence in Poetry

debut book of poetry
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“Intimate, spare, lucid, Masutani's poetry moves through a lifetime––from the domestic to the profound. Like a glass of cool water when I didn’t know I was parched. His poems revived me. And made me laugh aloud too!”–Hiromi Goto, author of Shadow Life.

“The poet Fred Cogswell spoke of ‘star people.’ You chance upon them. They emanate a certain deep inner glow. Matsuki Masutani has that bright starlight. You will know it when you meet/read him.”–Joy Kogawa.

“These brief poems record the act of taking notice. There’s a Zen smile at work as Masutani notes the dailyness of long marriage, effects of immigration, and life’s looming end to the daily. Each poem a ‘small frame’ through which ‘dark waters / dance.’–Daphne Marlatt, author of Intertidal: The Collected Earlier Poems 1968-2008.

“With nuanced charm, humour, and a mind of gentle insight and care, Masutani turns his eye to one moment after another, as if considering items at a garage sale. But this is no ordinary eye, and no ordinary poet; his years and struggles, his stumbles and realizations have taught him that to be intimate with all things is one way to express the meaning of a life. In these poems I laughed with him, and felt the trembling world when he came to know “it is earth-shattering / to keep this ordinary life / from shattering.”–Peter Levitt, author of One Hundred Butterflies.

In Masutani’s debut book of poetry, his clear minimalist poems embrace with gentle and perceptive wit; aging, family, dreams, his Japanese roots, self-acceptance and island life. Some poems rise tall like sunflowers in an understated garden, untangled and reflective, addressing marriage, Parkinson’s, Chemo and impermanence. You will know exactly where you are when you read “I will be more myself in the next world.” Japanese translations included.

Matsuki Masutani is a poet and translator living on Denman Island. He moved from Tokyo to Vancouver in 1976. Ten years later he moved to Denman Island, where he eventually began writing poems in English and Japanese. He has translated Canadian works such as Roy Kiyooka's Mothertalk, Hiromi Goto's Chorus of Mushrooms, and from Japanese into English, Kishizo Kimura's memoir, Witness to Loss, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2017. His poems have appeared in Geist magazine, Capilano Review and in the anthology Love of the Salish Sea Islands.

978-1-896949-87-1 | $19.95
110 pages, includes Japanese translations

shauna paull

blue gait
Shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize
new poems
$19.95
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Long-awaited, limned in deep listening, an elegant and wise songbook in the key of alterity.

"Gentle and strong, these haunting poems offer space as a balm for tense and troubled times: with delicate precision, the pages of this book ask us to witness injustice, and to contemplate the power of beauty. What harms us, what heals?"
–Renée Sarojini Saklikar, author of Bramah and The Beggar Boy.

"Flowing like a clear stream, nourishing us with quiet ceremony and care for our ancestors, the poems in this book share the “wide-hipped work of love.” “Brave as moonlight,” shauna paull makes space and time for humble loves and the joys of everyday life, irrepressible despite the systemic violence of the toxic colonialism that surrounds us. In the face of grief and loss, her words sing us back to life, again and again." –Rita Wong, author of Current Climate.

“shauna paull’s melodious works in blue gait express embodiment through relatedness, the wild garden, and the conflict zone. Richly flavoured west coast poetry.”–Joanne Arnott, author of A Night for the Lady.

“These poems temper grief scars, radically transition to transformation, desire and lightning joy, both in kneeling before the grace of received forewisdom and as gratitude to what was living light in the life of another. The hyphenated enjambments, like a treasured visionbook, create a technical hinge between realities, from well-considered sorrow, to attentively impassioned happiness, to closely examined commitment, all messaging — courage, clarity of mind, activism, intent to create progressive difference — no small thing.”
— Cathy Ford, author of Flowers We Will Never Know The Names Of.

blue gait offers witness to another way of living where human and material concerns are not at the centre of things and where human ascendency and heroic catharsis is redressed. Here is sung the labour of our elders, environmentalists, of daughters and lovers, elements and simple gifts made by hands, songs to answer our longing for a loving place in the failing loom of our generous planet.

shauna paull is a poet, educator and community advocate, and completed her MFA in Creative Writing at UBC. blue gait is her 2nd book of poetry, her first book, roughened in undercurrent was published by Leaf Press (2008). Shauna has led creative writing workshops at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts on the ancestral and unceded territories of the Tsleil-Waututh First Nation, since 2000 and for many different organizations in Vancouver. She currently the coordinates the Deer Lake Artist Residencies for the city of Burnaby. In community, shauna has worked extensively with migrant and refugee women in areas of labour and mobility rights, poverty alleviation and legislative reform. Shauna represented Canada at the UN Commission on the Status of Women in 2006. Her work can be found in RockSalt, an Anthology of Contemporary BC Poetry (Mother Tongue, 2008) Forcefield: 77 Women Poets of British Columbia (Mother Tongue, 2013) and In All the Spaces: Diverse Voices in Global Women’s Poetry, (Autopress, New Delhi, 2020). She lives in Vancouver.

978-1-896949-88-8
$19.95