Reviewer John Bradley sees an urgent link between the destruction described in Mariko Nagai’s Irradiated Cities and our country’s increasingly tense relationship with North Korea:
The use of the colons, as can be seen, blurs cause and effect. Everything is connected to everything else. Nagai uses the colons this way in all of the thirty-two prose poems in the book, even for the closing. There’s never a period to provide closure, even at the very end of each piece. The colon is the perfect punctuation for this book, as it’s logical, neutral, and inevitable.
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