Overview

Patricia Aya Williams' Ichiban follows a Japanese mother, an American father, and their daughter from post-WWII Japan to the Gen-X schoolyards of East San Jose. The collection exuberantly insists that ""we too / sing America"" applies to teenage girls whose tampons charge like a ""battering ram in a moat of blood"" and to a tough mother who loves watching sumo and rooting for ""wrestlers from her prefecture-Ishikawa"" and harshly judging them: ""Aww he too little / he not gonna make it."" After the father's early death, the speaker revisits photos of him on aircraft carriers, and the mother, as she nears her own death many decades later, asks him: ""Pat, my handsome young sailor / ichiban yasashii na kao, most gentle face // God ever show me on this earth- // how you will recognize / my prune face, more than twice your age?"" As if anyone could forget her, especially after Ichiban captures her voice, humor, and tenacity with such vibrancy. -Allison Pitinii Davis, Line Study of a Motel Clerk and Business: a novella Ichiban is an unsparing and unsentimental coming of age poetry-coming to terms with parents, coming to terms with cultural expectations, and with one's self. I am particularly taken by the variety of angles and poetic forms through which Williams views and recounts salient life-shaping episodes. The title poem ""Ichiban"" could stand alone-illustrated and animated. The entire collection is a gem. -Donna Hilbert, Louis Award judge and author of Enormous Blue Umbrella

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9781970256130

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Patricia Aya Williams grew up in San Jose, California, daughter of a Japanese-born mother and an American father. She is a graduate of San José State University, where she earned both a BA in humanities with a minor in Japanese and a master's in library and informationsciences. She enjoyed two diverse careers: first as a flight attendant, second as a public librarian. She is the author of the mini-chap Haiku for Parents (Origami Poems Project, 2020) and the chapbook Failure Goddess (Dancing Girl Press, 2026). Her poem ""Ichiban"" won the Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize 3rd Place in 2022, judged by Juan Felipe Herrera, and another poem, ""Abilene,"" received a Steve Kowit PoetryPrize Honorable Mention. Her poems are published in or forthcoming from many journals, including Whale Road Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, Jackdaw Review, Bicoastal Review, Dunes Review, Molecule, and Cæsura. She has work forthcoming in the Tupelo Press anthology The Writes of Spring and the Pangyrus anthology A Table to Hold the World. Her poetry collection, Ichiban, was a finalist in the 2025Swan Scythe Press Chapbook Contest and, in its full-length form, won the 2025 Concrete Wolf Louis Award. She lives in San Diego, California, with her husband, Christopher, and dog, Binxy Elton.

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