Nowhere Near Moloka‘i

Hawaiian poet Gary Chang’s Nowhere Near Moloka‘i is the most recent winner of local publisher Bear Star Press’s Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize. It is a powerful, sometimes disturbing, collection of poems that takes us from the Hawaiian days of Chang’s fictionalized main character Greydog (modeled after Chang’s own life), when he was a hired goat killer for the National Park Services, to an exploration of his next phase of life as a graduate student in Colorado (and his poignant visits back to his beloved and familiar Hawaii). Written in a combination of standard English, Hawaiian and Pidgin English, Nowhere Near Moloka‘i movingly represents what it means to be Hawaiian, straddling the cultures of the islands and mainland America. In “For Those Impure Words Not Selected,” we see how viewpoint so strongly affects interpretation: “I kill three goats on Pu’u Ma¯mane,/ approach the most easily/ possessed carcass…/ …the fatty tissue/ opens/ like torch ginger…/ …Death blows bitter in my bones./ At Colorado State, the post-modern poet says “I possess/ an aesthetic for death…”