this is paradise by kristiana kahakauwila

In a stunning collection that announces the arrival of an incredible talent, Kristiana Kahakauwila travels the islands of Hawai'i, making the fabled place her own. In each of these stories and poems, it’s the reaching out, the trying to understand, that creates the emotional center of the piece.Elegant, brutal, and profound- this magnificent debut captures the grit and glory of modern Hawai'i with breathtaking force and accuracy. The story is not about their difference, nor even really about the potential for their relationship, but about something else-artistic endeavor and discovering the depths of one’s self. It’s not going to work out.” But then the narrative turns.

In Sion Dayson’s story “Metal Man,” the narrator says to a woman with whom he’s falling in love that he thinks “maybe we’re just too different. A Sasquatch leaves his “prints in mud” in hopes that a woman he once saw will believe in him a friend of a fisherman’s son listens to stories that reveal and conceal in equal measure an apprentice shaman spends years listening to nothing in the belief he will one day connect with spirits. Aligned 2, this theme appears in delightful, unexpected ways. We can never completely know someone, and yet we must keep trying to. In this second anthology, there arises, for me, a twinned notion: that it is impossible to know every depth of another and yet, from the desire to bridge that unknowing springs tenderness, growth, and beauty. In my afterword, I asked: “How could any of us have planned to love these men-real men, imagined men-so much that we would memorialize them on paper? How could we have ever foreseen understanding them as we do, even if that understanding comes from writing them?” Aligned anthology, I noticed a theme of beloved-ness. She is working on a multi-generational historical novel set on the island of Maui. Her most recent work has appeared in Kartika Review, Mistake House, and RED INK: An International Journal of Indigenous Literature, Arts, & Humanities. She is an associate professor of creative writing at Western Washington University and was a 2015–16 Fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study.

Kristiana Kahakauwila is the author of This is Paradise: Stories (Hogarth, 2013), a Barnes & Noble Discover selection.

This is paradise by kristiana kahakauwila