Poetry. THE GIRL WITHOUT ARMS is a figure in Japanese folklore—a young girl whose arms are lopped off by her father, and is left to die in the mountains. The father, at the behest of his evil wife—the girl's stepmother—lures the girl into the mountains at the promise of attending a neighboring festival. This is only the beginning of the tale. The poems of Brandon Shimoda's THE GIRL WITHOUT ARMS are birthed of the rainy shut-in pause between steps forward and back in a season of great floods. In successive and interlocked sequences, these poems grapple with a seemingly unbridgeable confusion—related to love, the impossibility of life outside of love, and the unbearableness of life within it—as a way to give shape to the dark weather that permeates our lives, so as not to drown at its coming.

Brandon Shimoda was born in California and has since lived in eleven states and six countries, most recently Maine, Taiwan and Arizona. He is the author of O BON (Litmus Press, 2011), THE GIRL WITHOUT ARMS (Black Ocean, 2011) and THE ALPS (Flim Forum Press, 2008), as well as numerous limited edition chapbooks, including The Grave on the Wall (DoubleCross Press, 2011), Lake M (Corollary Press, 2010), The Inland Sea, (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2008) and, with poet/artist Phil Cordelli, The Pines, Volumes 1-6. He is co-editing, with poet/critic Thom Donovan, a retrospective collection of Etel Adnan's poetry and prose, to be published by Nightboat Books in 2013.

Reviews and Other Links
Publishers Weekly
Sueyeun Juliette Lee @ The Constant Critic
Charles Kruger @ The Rumpus
Jason Daniel Schwartz @ Zoland Poetry
J. A. Tyler @ Pank