“If you think nothing could be more technicolor, juicy, and full of signifiers come to life than Los Angeles, you have not met (or read) NAOMIE ANOMIE. These voluptuous neon lyrics bring you from the infinite loop of its first circular poem into ‘megatons of ocean’ to the gut kick of ‘you don't know what things are until you break them.’ The taking of the innate, the floral, the paradisiacal—the arrival of Cook in Hawai'i—this violence is at the heart of Hasegawa’s poems. In such a world, there’s nowhere to look: sun-dried remnants of narrative, disembodied voices. The father in the poems, he combs ‘the white curls / steaming from / the forest floor.’ You stay on the ride and the poet says, ‘Psychopomp, ferry her.’”

Cynthia Arrieu-King, author of Manifest, winner of the Gatewood Prize

“References of resentment, both residual and retired, ritualistic and religious, yet refereeing research that remains real. A reckoning of reality without resisting alien ghosts. Resolution or revolution? No, redemption. Hasegawa continues the lineage of Kazuko Shiraishi but with the absence of linear time as in Shuri Kido.”

Shinji Eshima, the composer of the quintet, Hymn for Her