"Taking their cue from over a hundred years of Japanese linked verse, four erstwhile strangers set out on their own adventurous pilgrimage of renshi. Straying from clas [...]
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I consider myself extremely lucky to be one of those with an early look at Juliet S. Kono's new novel, Anshū, from Bamboo Ridge Press. The book will be out [...]
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Poets are time travelers. They move through time as swiftly as the mind darts from today to a dusty past, or from this known moment to an unknown future. The new Bamboo Ridge Press book No Choice but to Follow documents a year in the lives of poets Jean Yamasaki Toyama, Juliet S. Kono, Ann Inoshita, and Christy Passion as they created 48 linked poems.

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The idea of linked poems, so beautifully realized in the new Bamboo Ridge Press book No Choice but to Follow, fits snugly into a larger idea. The four poets—Jean Yamasaki Toyama, Juliet S. Kono, Ann Inoshita, and Christy Passion—linked their poems, one to the next, for twelve months in 2008.

What exactly did they use to link the poems?  They used words.  Taking the last line of the most recent poem as the starting point for a new poem, they connected not only poems, they also connected experiences, memories, and emotions. One poem built upon the other, the project grew, unfolding like an exotic, yet familiar, flower.

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How do we marry traditional book publishing to various online and digital media in a way that makes sense to readers?

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