Mimi White's 'World Disguised' Book Launch Set for 9/15

Deerbrook Editions is pleased to announce the publication of Mimi White's newest collection of poetry, The World Disguised as This One, a year in tanka. Please join the author for a reading, conversation, and celebration September 15 @ 5:30 PM at WEST Theatre 959 Islington Street Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Doors open at 5:00 PM. Contact Pontine Theatre - info@pontine.org / 603-436-6660.

This book is the culmination of Mimi's collaborating with Australian artists Kerryn Forster and Jessie Stanley. In this collaboration each artist explores the word "contain" through the lens of her art form: Mimi through poetry, Kerryn through sculpture, and Jessie through graphic design. Currently, a show that includes Mimi's tanka as well as the work created by Kerryn and Jessie is on display at the Anita Traverso Gallery in Melbourne, Australia.
One of the oldest Japanese forms, the tanka (or waka) originated in seventh-century Japan. Perhaps less well known to Western audiences than the haiku, it predates this form by several hundred years. The tanka usually contains thirty-one syllables or sound units, nearly double the haiku's seventeen. Like the haiku, the tanka's central image is taken from nature, but a shift almost always occurs when that image is recast through a more personal lens. As Yoel Hoffman writes in his introduction to Japanese Death Poems, "The tanka poet may be likened to a person holding two mirrors in his hands, one reflecting a scene from nature, the other reflecting himself as he holds the first mirror."

As a former Portsmouth Poet Laureate, Mimi has dedicated much of her writing life to creating community through poetry. Previous collections have been awarded the Philbrick Poetry Award and also the Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Poetry. This is Mimi's strongest collection to date. As Jane Hirshfield writes, "This beautifully observed, penetrating collection of tanka slips itself into and under awareness... in reading these pages through, their accumulation leads to a shifted landscape of being. As life itself does."