[On a green summer night,]

Sayumi Kamakura
Translated from the Japanese by James Shea

 On a green summer night,a horse of glassneighs in the distance  緑の夜とおくでガラスの馬いななく

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Sayumi Kamakura is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Moisture, Cross in the Water, From the Skylight, La La La Goes the Sea, and The Collected Haiku of Sayumi Kamakura. Her work has appeared in dozens of anthologies in Japan and overseas, and she is the only haiku poet featured in Japanese Women Poets: An Anthology edited by Hiroaki Sato. She is the recipient of the Oki Sango Prize, Modern Haiku Association Prize, and the Azsacra International Poetry Award.

James Shea is the author of Last Day of My Face (University of Iowa Press, 2025), selected by Brenda Shaughnessy for the Iowa Poetry Prize. His previous collections include The Lost Novel (Fence Books) and Star in the Eye, selected by Nick Flynn for the Fence Modern Poets Series.

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Applause for a Cloud
Black Ocean
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Sayumi Kamakura's Applause for a Cloud uses the haiku form to attend to everyday life with a cosmological acuteness, invoking wonder on macro and micro scales.

In this groundbreaking bi-lingual collection, Japanese poet Sayumi Kamakura transforms the haiku into a contemporary vehicle for exploring life’s most intimate moments and vast mysteries. Moving between her home in Japan and travels in Morocco and Italy, between her husband's illness and the global pandemic, Kamakura crafts precise observations that ripple outward into profound revelation. While honoring haiku's attention to nature and seasonal change, she breaks free of its constraints to forge a new path—where the ordinary becomes extraordinary, and where stillness speaks volumes.

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