Common Grace

These well-wrought poems show a distinct artistic sensibility. Through personal loss, grief, and love, they enter the domain of history and human migrations. Common Grace is an uncommon book, elegant, at times tough-minded, also moving. -Ha Jin, National Book Award-winning author of Waiting In vivid, moving poems that span cultures, generations, and geographies, Aaron Caycedo-Kimura's Common Grace evokes the mysteries and wonder in everyday life. Here is a poet of clear-eyed originality, big-hearted and wise-and a book to read again and again. -Matthew Thorburn, author of The Grace of Distance The quality of wonder, lucid and luminous, energizes Aaron Caycedo-Kimura's Common Grace. In these poems, the visible world radiates meaning, memory becomes palpable, and loss is acknowledged. Caycedo-Kimura brings a wry, tender, musical and unsentimental attention to family love, sexual love, love of nature, and the underlying love of art. -Robert Pinsky, 3-time United States Poet Laureate I love the tender, lyrical 'labored stroke' with which poet-painter Aaron Caycedo-Kimura makes his art. With a poet's sensibility and an artist's cool eye, he elegizes and celebrates his family's heartbreaking, triumphant history, and his own. Common Grace, his first full-length collection, pays fluent loving attention to life and art-and their rewards glow! -Gail Mazur, author of Land's End: New and Selected Poems Aaron Caycedo-Kimura's debut full-length collection, Common Grace, spans decades, geography, and poetic styles and forms. At once a moving yet unsentimental tribute to his Japanese parents (who wanted 'no funeral no obituary in the newspaper'), as well as an ars poetica of an introverted poet-painter, Common Grace is no common book of poetry. A better tribute than any gravestone or obituary, Common Grace (with its striking images, chorus of different forms, and historical narratives, including those of Japanese internment) announces Caycedo-Kimura as an important new voice making art from the complexities and contradictions of being a third-generation Japanese American. In work that is both deeply personal and profoundly universal, Caycedo-Kimura, in looking at a photograph of his mother, writes ('Tokyo Army Hospital, 1957,'): 'She's twenty-nine, half my age. I want to go back in time, tell her something wise or at least helpful, but having lived through a world war, she already knows more than I do.' The poems in Common Grace offer us both beauty and wisdom in equal measure. -Jennifer Franklin, author of No Small Gift