Works
Waiting for Sunset to Bury Red Camellias
Waiting for Sunset to Bury Red Camellias
"Wake up, sleepwalkers: There's a new book by Miho Kinnas that will show you places in your heart you have not gone yet—because her poems are not stories of feelings but the feelings themselves. Kinnas is known for her short Japanese poems, and moral clarity. The same crystalline reality is found in her narrative poems, because Kinnas illuminates the edges of words, then wraps the whole poem in a ribbon of silk. This is craft. These poems are occupied by mothers and daughters, girls, and women; the book's subject is love and, that's a theme that is perfect to make beauty permanent, as Kinnas' poetry certainly does in Waiting for Sunset to Bury Red Camellias." - Grace Cavalieri, Maryland Poet Laureate
Waiting for Sunset to Bury Red Camellias by Miho Kinnas (Free Verse Press 2023)
From Japan now residing in Hilton Head Island, Kinnas displays, in this third book, both worlds with sparse lines and lush landscapes. A 17-page, 14-section poem fills its middle in ekphrastic dioramas, Chinese art bending into feminist edges, where "pulled silk whispers." In "Bird" she writes "I pull the horizon closer . . . I let the horizon go." This, Kinnas's poetic vision, a pulling in and spiraling out across seascapes, cities, flowers. No accident her "Three Shrimp Boats on the Horizon" earns a Best American Poetry selection; sparse lines like "Air. Water. Wishes." weigh each word, thought, connection: a world past language. This is The Kinnas World. (Elizabeth Robin - Goodreads Review)
Review (Jasper, Spring 2024) by Tim Conroy (link to PDF file)
Several poems from this book also live different lives.
1) The Bird on the Poetry Trail, shown on the Home Page, is one.
2) - A
Music Video by Andrew K. Clark - Bilingual Version -
The Door
A door just opened on a street.
A love affair that lasted a lifetime
stepped onto the pavement.
I was held in such a familiar way
while learning the unfamiliar body.
We had all the time in the world, as if.
A love affair that lasted a lifetime
didn't look back at the closing door
of the bus I had missed.
Miho Kinnas
2) - B
When printed, we can fold the sheet into a little booklet.
3)
The origami video mentioned above in the Origami Poem Project was produced
by The Arts Center of South Carolina as part of the Japan Week. The video was
created by an amazing couple, Carrie and Butch Hirsch. . . The poem, Thursday
is about the day when Carrie, Butch and I met at a coffee shop.
RIP Butch Hirsch
Thursday
4 am A dream woke me: The baby fell into a hole, and I didn't follow to rescue her.
5 am In German, "boredom" is "a long while"; in Buddhism, "mental defeat".
6 am Watching a shrimp boat offshore, a melody from Carnaval began playing.
7 am A brown dog hugged me on the beach, and my hand still smells of dog.
8 am A paper crane adds the smell of a cinnamon bun to my fingers.
9 am Pierrot and Harlequin: the one with the wand is not Pierrot.
10 am Fish jumps; Paganini's Caprice is Take Five.
11 am The husband and wife think the same thoughts, in different orders.
noon YouTube archives: Horowitz played Carnaval with many wrong notes.
1 pm Too much cream drowns his schnitzel.
2 pm 1976, compound sentences clatter Jackie Kay's biography.
3 pm The craving for an ingredient like salt and vinegar is hard to appease.
4 pm Continuation; Found poem my own: "You miss me so much. I must be lost."
5 pm The heart was made of waxed napkins, like a rose.
4)
My daughter, Leslie Capalbo, on violin - We performed the sequence,
The Sea Fog Arrives to Hide the Lies of a Woman Poet
New York Writers Workshop Reading in Brooklyn
TWO MORE POEMS FROM THE BOOK:
Yokohama
I am drawing a map
to my parents' house on the hill.
The scale is confused.
There are many inaccuracies.
A little corner fruit shop is now a pet store.
Time may be psychological.
My boyfriend was always late.
Older taxi drivers know the tomb-stone cutter.
Young ones know it like a ghost story.
The road zips through the fire station.
The big chestnut tree
no longer there where all summer
cicadas spent their one week on earth.
They were so loud —we often gave up talking, listened
to them rolling our eyes to each other and broke into a big laughter.
That shut them up!
One day coming home from school a concrete pole blocked
our view of the hill. My mother complained to the electric company.
It is still there.
A boy threw a pebble at my window.I was on the phone
with another boy. I draw a little heart.
All three hearts were broken.
My mother served bowls of ramen noodle for my friends
complete with pork, eggs, sesame seeds, scallions
seaweed and spinach.
My mother began taking rests
on the way up the hill
the way my father did in his late years.
The day I saw my mother for the last time
she staggered out of the house without a cane.
I am fine, I am fine, Don't worry, I 'm fine. I draw a stick figure.
With her open sky smile she held onto the edge of the fence with her right
hand, her left hand sparkled a little. I draw her waving hand.
She watched my brother drive me away.
(First published - As The Scale is Cnfused in Soul Spaces Poems on Citis, Towns and Villages (Anthology) Author Press (2023)
The Pitch
Five mornings in a row, my mother tells me about her dreams.
She keeps dreaming about her childhood in Manchuria.
Like the silhouette on the revolving lantern.
Kaleidoscopic.
The sun was stunning dipping into the horizon!
How thick the ice was on the lake in the forest!
Did I tell you about the stolen skates we found
at the thieves' market in the morning?
In one of the last dreams I heard
she was a thirteen-year-old entrepreneur.
She and her friends sold cigarettes to passersby
near the Harbin bridge.
Our sales pitch was in Chinese and Russian!
Choyan ma? Su-kirt?
Choyan ma? Su-kirt?
I may die soon.
If you leave now I won't see you again.
I didn't believe her.
I still hear her voice repeating the pitch
with a chuckle in between.
We Eclipse into the Other Side: Twoness Poems
A few more copies are available from Pinyon Publishing:
I asked in Google: What is Twoness Poems?
This is the AI review (April 29, 2025)
"Twoness poems" refers to a collaborative poetic form where two writers create a poem together,
line by line, building upon each other's contributions. This collaborative process can lead to surprising
and unique poetic outcomes, fostering a deeper understanding between the poets and expanding their
individual perspectives. Miho Kinnas and E. Ethelbert Miller, for example, are known for their "Twoness Poems,"
which explore themes of friendship, beauty, and the healing power of collaboration. [1, 2]
Key aspects of twoness poems: [2]
• Collaborative Creation: The poem is built through an exchange of lines or stanzas, with each writer contributing and responding to the other. [2]
• Exploration of Connection: The process of working closely with another poet can lead to a deeper understanding of both oneself and the other person. [1]
• Unexpected Results: The collaborative nature of twoness poems can result in unexpected and surprising poetic outcomes. [1, 2]
• Theme of Healing and Unity: Some twoness poems explore themes of healing and finding unity in a divisive world. [2]
• Email Call and Response: Some twoness poems are created through an email exchange, where each writer responds to the other's contribution,
as described by Pinyon Publishing. [2]
Generative AI is experimental.
[1] https://writers.com/course/twoness-poems[2] http://pinyon-publishing.com/weeclipse.html
Move Over, Bird
Move Over, Bird
Following her first poetry collection, Today, Fish Only, Miho enchants with Move Over, Bird—a collection that meditates on the various forms of poetry that exists, or have been "invented" by the poet. Starting with a series of seven poems, Miho builds a snapshot of an ordinary day, sifting it into pieces, and rebuilding it in fourteen sentences. As much as poem is a song and a song is a poem, Miho takes this on in "Sudoku", a song-like poem, a style she assembled from reading and writing a vast range of haikus. The poem is accompanied by artist Lisa Anne Cullen.
Here is a visualized book of Move Over, Bird
Today, Fish Only
Today, Fish Only
The discrepancy between premonition and experience, being 'awake/a few seconds before/ the earthquake' is in Miho's hands both a source of music and of heartache, the foreshadowing of a disconnected lover and the heart left still at Tokyo Station', the difference between 'this' you need and the 'that'which 'could ruin your life', between one language and another. Her poems are wise to the necessity of this difference between the expectation of an ending and 'the language of youth at each other's funeral'. Her poems sing of this necessity like 'coins in a lonely/phone booth'. Thanks to her we hear xylophones, bells, warblers, in the rhythms of a fuge, an arabesque, a sutra, "all the way home'.