Overview

A surreal story in verse that follows a woman facing the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic alongside ecological crisis and crumbling social norms. Jennifer Hasegawa's Naomie Anomie: A Biography of Infinite Desire, is an experimental poetic take on biography, growing increasingly surreal as it follows the truths behind its unreliable narrator through paradoxes rendered in luxurious detail. This book is a portrait of a flawed life, a call for attention to the looming ecological crisis, and a lyrical experiment in truth-telling. Feeling ever-increasing existential strain leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic and culminating in her decision to no longer venture outside of her apartment, Naomie is not surprised to find her name is an anagram for anomie, a term for the breakdown of social norms. In these pages is a meticulous account of everything that went wrong in Naomie's five decades of life. We find retellings of a life's most significant moments—not because they are sources of pride, but because they stand as the only decipherable moments of humanity amid a world of static. This story in verse acts as a survival guide, romance novel, liberation handbook, pulp thriller, and jokebook for those who will live through ongoing plagues, environmental change, total AI integration, water wars, and cyberattacks and who will come out the other side ready to restart.

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9781632431653

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Reviews

""References of resentment, both residual and retired, ritualistic and religious, yet refereeing research that remains real. A reckoning of reality without resisting alien ghosts. Resolution or revolution? No, redemption. Hasegawa continues the lineage of Kazuko Shiraishi but with the absence of linear time as in Shuri Kido.""--Shinji Eshima, the composer of the quintet, Hymn for Her ""If you think nothing could be more technicolor, juicy, and full of signifiers come to life than Los Angeles, you have not met (or read) NAOMIE ANOMIE. These voluptuous neon lyrics bring you from the infinite loop of its first circular poem into 'megatons of ocean' to the gut kick of 'you don't know what things are until you break them.' The taking of the innate, the floral, the paradisiacal--the arrival of Cook in Hawai'i--this violence is at the heart of Hasegawa's poems. In such a world, there's nowhere to look: sun-dried remnants of narrative, disembodied voices. The father in the poems, he combs 'the white curls / steaming from / the forest floor.' You stay on the ride and the poet says, 'Psychopomp, ferry her.'""--Cynthia Arrieu-King, author of Manifest, winner of the Gatewood Prize

Author Information

Jennifer Hasegawa is the author of La Chica’s Field Guide to Banzai Living, which was longlisted for The Believer Book Award for Poetry. Her poetry has appeared in the Adroit Journal, Bamboo Ridge, Bennington Review, jubilat, Tule Review, and Vallum. She is the founder of the Kau Kau Chronicles (kaukauchronicles.org), a website dedicated to preserving and sharing recipes from out-of-print cookbooks published by Hawai’i community organizations from the early twentieth to the early twenty-first century. Hasegawa is a third-generation Japanese American, born and raised on the Big Island of Hawai’i, and she currently lives in San Francisco.  

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