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The prelude to The Hidden Stream conveys Stephanie Sugioka’s intent with forceful grace: I mean the prose that surrounds these poems to tell of the earth from which the flowers grow. For without this humble stuff of everyday life, there would be no poems. She then invites us to see how these flowers have come to grow from the raw earth of my being. The interplay of light and shadow, poem and story, of Sugioka’s exquisite memoir give access to the inner currents of a life enriched by cultural, spiritual, and intellectual influences, but even more, of a soul attuned to streams and trees for nurturance and modeling. As she writes in her poem After Reading The Tale of Genji, -
a woman’s soul is like wind. -Suzanne Underwood Rhodes, author of Flying Yellow In her new memoir, Stephanie Sugioka says that hers has been a life that’s mostly been unremarkable. Readers, however, should not let that modest appraisal deter them from following The Hidden Stream: A Life in Prose and Verse from its source to where it meets us in the present moment. As graceful as it is honest and heartfelt, her narrative takes readers from her childhood, growing up in the only Japanese-American (or any sort of Asian) family in the small southern town of Chapel Hill, North Carolina…in the fifties before the civil rights movement; and then through various relocations and life changes while she reflects on being a daughter, wife, mother, teacher, poet, and writer. The writer asks, what about the dirt from which these flowers grow … roots, worms, and decaying leaves? The poems included in this memoir fold and uncover, uncover and fold, with origami-like precision, various moments that reward with their insight, ache, and quiet beauty. -Luisa A. Igloria, author of The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis and Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser In this lovely, thoughtful memoir of poems and prose-a hybrid form whose ancestry is the Japanese haibun-the inner world flowers through the poems, while the prose gives them a chronological and autobiographical frame. The work has an eloquent clarity, purity and a genuine modesty; the reader is respected, invited in, drawn into a world where life and art are one, and union becomes communion as we recognize ourselves in the clear and moving mirror of The Hidden Stream. -Eleanor Wilner, 2019 Frost Medalist and author of Before Our Eyes: New and Selected Poems 1975-2017
