"The Panoramic Grave: Rediscovering Brandon Shimoda's THE DESERT"
by Michael Juliani
The thirty-six days I’ve already spent in quarantine during the COVID-19 crisis mark the longest period of time I’ve gone in the past decade without perusing a bookstore. Sheltered in my Brooklyn apartment, I’ve turned to my stockpile of unread books, and rediscovered Brandon Shimoda’s 2018 poetry collection The Desert, published by The Song Cave.
Written in Tucson, Arizona, between 2011 and 2014, The Desert is a book of meditative, visionary, and estranging sections of poetry. The book dwells in and wrestles with the landscape that hosted concentration camps for Japanese-Americans during World War II. Members of Shimoda’s own family were put in internment camps, a subject he writes about further in his memoir The Grave on the Wall (City Lights Books, 2019).
The poems in The Desert are untethered by time, roving through ancestral visions and contemporary notation, much as a dreamer is able to switch bodies and anthropomorphize animals, rocks, or sky. It is difficult to track the speaker of Shimoda’s poems, as his work permeates the delineation between self and other. With this untethering, Shimoda creates a body of text and formal space that unites human and nonhuman aspects of the desert, embodying it as something internal. In his poem “Incarceration,” Shimoda writes, “There has to be a landscape / For wandering in place / For the nomad never leaves / The confines of the mind.”
As he wrote The Desert during the early years of the past decade, Shimoda’s implicit awareness of the Tucson area considers its legacy of carceral traumas. These include its Native American history (the nearby Gila River Indian Reservation was the site of an internment camp); its history as a location for convict labor outposts in the early 20th Century; and in more recent years the status of the desert’s perilous terrain as an official “deterrence” to immigration from the Mexico border. Shimoda writes in his poem, “Mountains,” referring to the World War II-era internment camps: “No fence, no guard tower, but terrain erasing / The world, where the crests of the mountain meet the sky // Folds / The mind and the soul in // To the panoramic grave—"
One of The Desert’s sections is a culling of diary-like entries, excerpted from emails Shimoda sent to various friends in the span of a year. This section is a delight for its stylistic boldness, placed within a book where it serves as a formal outlier. It also suggests that his arrival in Tucson becomes a sort of pilgrimage. While housesitting and exploring the unfamiliar city, Shimoda reckons with the desert’s lost people: “People born missing, stapled to fences, spray-painted on walls / Heroic in their lack of fruition.”
As a miner of impacted energies and a witness to the American west’s settler legacy, Shimoda traces the presence of his ancestors through a landscape that produces awe as well as grief. Many of the foundations of our current carceral state were created in the west, as the push for white dominance focused the dreams of its developing society. Shimoda’s book reminds me that the stories of that history are embedded in our contemporary lives, whether or not our own ancestors were present for the jailing.
Michael Juliani is a poet, editor, and writer from Pasadena, California. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in outlets such as Tammy, Cutbank, Prelude, Pigeon Pages, NECK, Washington Square Review, the Los Angeles Times and BOMB. He has edited four books of stories by the photographer Harun Mehmedinovic. Currently, he is a member of the poetry committee for the PEN America Prison Writing Program. Together with three other poets, he is the co-host of the Poem Party Podcast. He has an MFA in poetry from Columbia University, and he lives in Brooklyn, New York.
