The Thorn Puller: Hiromi Itō and Jeffrey Angles
7:00 pm PT
The Ruby | San Francisco, CA
One of the most distinctive voices in Japanese poetry, Hiromi Itō, and translator (and distinguished poet himself) Jeffrey Angles join prize-winning poet and Bay Area local Mia Ayumi Malhotra to present The Thorn Puller, by Hiromi Itō, translated by Jeffrey Angles, at The Ruby SF.
The first novel to appear in English by award-winning author Hiromi Itō, The Thorn Puller, translated by Jeffrey Angles, explores the absurdities, complexities, and challenges experienced by a woman caring for her two families: her husband and daughters in California and her aging parents in Japan. As the narrator shuttles back and forth between these two starkly different cultures, she creates a powerful and entertaining narrative about what it means to live and die in a globalized society.
Itō has been described as a “shaman of poetry” because of her skill in allowing the voices of others to flow through her. Here she enriches her semi-autobiographical novel by channeling myriad voices drawn from Japanese folklore, poetry, literature, and pop culture. The result is a generic chimera—part poetry, part prose, part epic—a unique, transnational, polyvocal mode of storytelling. One throughline is a series of memories associated with the Buddhist bodhisattva Jizo, who helps to remove the “thorns” of human suffering.
Event admission is free, but registration is required(opens in a new tab). The exact address of the event will be sent after registration.
This event is co-presented by Stone Bridge Press and The Ruby SF.
Hiromi Itō, born in 1955 in Tokyo, is one of the most important and highly regarded poets in Japan. Since her sensational debut in the late 1970s as a free-spirited and intelligent female poet with shamanisitic qualities, Ito has published more than ten collections of poetry, including such monumental works as Oume (Green Plums, 1982), Watashi wa Anjuhimeko de aru (I am Anjyuhimeko, 1993), and Kawara Arekusa (Wild Grass upon a Riverbank, 2005), which won the prestigious Takami Jun Award.
Jeffrey Angles is a poet, translator, and professor at Western Michigan University. His collection of Japanese-language poetry won the Yomiuri Prize for Literature. His translations of feminist and queer writers from Japan have won numerous awards. Among his recent translations are the feminist writer Itō Hiromi’s contemporary classic The Thorn Puller, the queer poet Takahashi Mutsuo’s poetry collection Only Yesterday, and the science-fiction author Kayama Shigeru’s 1950s novels Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again.
Mia Ayumi Malhotra is the author of Mothersalt (Alice James Books, forthcoming 2025); Notes from the Birth Year, winner of the Bateau Press BOOM Chapbook Contest; and Isako Isako, a California Book Award finalist and winner of the Alice James Award, the Nautilus Gold Award, a National Indie Excellence Award, and a Maine Literary Award. Her poems have been recognized internationally with the Hawker Prize for Southeast Asian Poetry and the Singapore Poetry Prize, and she has received fellowships from Kundiman and VONA/Voices of Our Nation. Mia holds creative writing degrees from Stanford University and the University of Washington, and she currently teaches poetry at Left Margin LIT in Berkeley.