This collection of seven short stories and one long one, "Mo-o of the Kawainui," after which the volume is named, represents an experiment in voice, my struggle to express fictively the complexities of my personal background and upbringing. The first, "Crabs," represents my original breakthrough in voice. It is through the protagonist, Doc Chang, and his crab Chester that I am able to describe one of the teeming places of my childhood--a place where awe and imagination were alive every morning and every day--and to hear and see into the darkest, most subterranean places of my life. Despite...

Get Poi? is creative nonfiction in which I remember and recreate my experiences as a child in wartime Honolulu. I wanted to touch, see, hear, smell, and taste the world that shaped my growing up and acquiring of language. It was a world of growing ethnic diversity, a polyglot culture in which the ability to speak Standard English was a touchstone of one's trustworthiness and loyalty to the United States of America, and in which my second generation Japanese-American parents did their best to raise me and my increasing number of siblings to become the human beings we would need to be. The task...

In these poems, I acknowledge a sense of rootlessness--that I, like my immigrant grandparents and even my second-generation parents, will not return to the place of my birth. The poems express my love as a sojourner for the Montana mountains, valleys and streams where I live my life, even after being diagnosed with a blood disorder, in gratitude and fullness.

The poems arranged before the yoga poems are about staying in touch with language during a difficult period in my life. In these early poems I tried different voices in order to arrive at change in myself. In the end I learned that all I'd done was to hide from myself and others, even those closest to me, because of a fear of commitment. The self-irony I used, while revealing some truth about myself, became a self-protective shield that not only thwarted my attempts at self-recognition but also denied my deepest desire for wholeness. While practicing Yoga, I learned that the stretching...