Join us for a special 6pm poetry and translation event co-sponsored by the University of Iowa Asian Studies department!  Mary Jo Bang, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and her fellow poet and translator, Yuki Tanaka will present the first collection in English of twentieth century Japanese surrealist poet Shuzo Takiguchi, A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi. Takiguchi’s “ingenious, playful, and erotic poems, complete with an introduction and the original Japanese texts on facing pages,” will “…read as if they could have been written today, yet they are so original that they couldn’t have been written by anyone else. Bang and Tanaka’s skillful, colloquial translations offer English readers a long-overdue introduction to this important poet.” (Princeton University Press) Rae Armantrout, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and author of Go Figure, describes A Kiss for the Absolute as “…a playful, almost campy, flirtation with beauty—which he refuses to put on a pedestal. One object substitutes for another with a kind of giddy hilarity.”
Mary Jo Bang is the author of nine books of poems—including A Film in Which I Play Everyone, nominated for a Lambda Literary Award, a PEN Voelcker Award, and the Heartland Booksellers Award, A Doll for Throwing, and Elegy which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She’s published translations of Dante’s Inferno, illustrated by Henrik Drescher, and Purgatorio. Paradiso is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2025. She is also the translator of Colonies of Paradise: Poems by Matthias Göritz, and co-translator, with Yuki Tanaka, of A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi, from Princeton University Press. She has a BA and MA in Sociology from Northwestern University, a BA in Photography from the Polytechnic of Central London (now Westminster University), and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. She’s been the recipient of a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin.

Yuki Tanaka was born and raised in Yamaguchi, Japan. He is the author of the debut poetry collection, Chronicle of Drifting, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in April 2025. His poems have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, POETRY, and elsewhere. His chapbook Séance in Daylight was selected by Sandra Lim for the 2018 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. He has also co-translated, with Mary Jo Bang, A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi. He received an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin, and a PhD in English from Washington University in St. Louis. He lives in Tokyo and teaches at Hosei University