Gaijin

Exquisite and excruciating, Gaijin is a blunt, alarmingly honest accounting of scars and blows to the spirit. Part memoir, part mythology, and part eulogy to a grandfather, Gaijin simultaneously tracks a personal rupture and a family, through the painful and awkward reclamation of the self after sexual violence and the evocation of a patriarch, half dreamed, half real. So powerful is the poetry and aching of Gaijin, it crushes the breath out of you as you read.