Kiwao Nomura


Kiwao Nomura is a Japanese poet, writer, critic, and lecturer. He is considered one of the driving forces behind contemporary Japanese poetry.

Literary style

The work of Nomura "plays with language in radical and diverse ways, employing subtleties of rhythm, semantics, image, gender, punctuation, and repetition, often all within the same short stanza." Forrest Gander, co-translator of Kiwao Nomura’s poetry, noted in an interview, "What we find in innovative Japanese poetries like Gozo Yoshimasu's and Kiwao Nomura's has, as far as I know, no equivalents in contemporary poetry in English. The mix of the philosophical and the whimsical makes for a tone that is absolutely weird to Westerners."
According to Poetry International Web, "In all such experiments, Nomura shows himself to be very much in search of a center of gravity where the almost ritual repetitions and revisitations of captivating sounds and images dissolve of their own accord into the night, darkness, nothingness, the end of a delirium."
Publishers Weekly concludes that Nomura's poems "succeed through astonishment, shock, and disorder, almost in the manner of Kathy Acker or William S. Burroughs."

Published works

Books of poetry translated in English