What blew me away about this collection is how it works as a remarkably coherent whole, an inquiry into an overall topic — ‘dumb luck’ — yet each of the poems can also stand alone as its own beautiful meditation, and they are all quite different from each other. What also emerges gradually, brilliantly, is that a poem is the exact right tool with which to consider this topic, because of the way that it (in Kitano’s hands, anyway) can so gracefully weave together multiple threads of time, while also giving you a sense of pausing to observe and really notice this particular juncture of their interconnection.
Dumb luck is, on the one hand, a kind of teleology, a path already mapped out, but also its opposite; the ‘dumb’ arbitrariness, that you should happen to be in this spot at this specific moment; that the various factors at play will collide just so. An inch to the left and all would be different. And so it is also a manifestation of how we are placed in the world, in a family, in a culture, where we don’t always fit so comfortably — where we cannot be what our parents wish we were, or where we cannot help but be something other people fear. And it is also the strangeness of our path through the world — how we start up in one place and look up to find ourselves half a world away, and so different from what our younger self could ever have imagined, but still, also, the same.
This book illuminates all these meanings in the most astonishingly vivid way, but also so subtly. It’s just incredible.
Kasia Reads 
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