Under a Future Sky
The speaker of Brynn Saito’s Under a Future Sky is constantly in conversation, whether questioning the Tarot, answering questions about inherited memory, or writing letters—to family members, the reader, a fellow poet. (Saito archives related correspondence, and some of her letter poems, in the collaborative web project “Dear—”.) Invocations include “Prayer for a Trembling Body,” a response to the 2021 murder of six Asian women in Atlanta:
Dear radical ancestor: I’m eating their
language. Help me set down my hus-
band’s gun, unstitch my eyes. Show me
post-memory ghosts in the name of new
justice […]
Postmemory, a term coined by Marianne Hirsch to capture the experience of the generation that comes after lived trauma, pervades this collection: Saito’s paternal grandparents were incarcerated in camps where the U.S. government held more than 125,000 civilians of Japanese ancestry during World War II. “Do you ever / feel alive with someone else’s memories, ancestral animals / incepted in nightmares, projected in dreams?” the speaker of “Letter to My Sister” asks. In “Self Disguised as Memory Hunter,” dedicated to two of the internment camps she visits, the speaker “stretch[es] the bone of my mind’s eye over the old settlement.”
These poems move not only backward in “this performance with ghosts,” but also forward, imagining future generations. “What have I hunted? / What will I haunt?,” asks the speaker in one poem, then, as if in answer, she declares: “I become dirt death and star bath— / art in another century,” and “I become / story-silk and lost song […] ringing in the houses of my children’s / children’s children.”
Saito deftly posits memory as a tool for survival while simultaneously working to acknowledge the life and creations stolen from those imprisoned. In “Letter to My Father,” the speaker conjures lost gardens, lost poems, and their makers:
Poets in camp
numbered months and years by the memory
of their home gardens left behind on the West Coast:
flowering rhododendrons and peony buds they imagined
as vibrant, their stalks remaining firm. […]
