Topaz by Brian Komei Dempster $15.95 + $5.00 S/H per item

“TOPAZ” by Brian Komei Dempster, his debut poetry collection, examines the experiences of a Japanese American family separated and incarcerated in American World War II prison camps. This volume delves into the lasting intergenerational impact of imprisonment and breaks a cultural legacy of silence. Through the fractured lenses of past and present, personal and collective, the speaker seeks to piece together the facets of his own identity and to shed light on a buried history.

Dempster is a professor of rhetoric and language and a faculty member in Asian Pacific American Studies, and Director of the Master of Arts in Asia Pacific Studies at the University of San Francisco. He is editor of “From Our Side of the Fence: Growing Up in America’s Concentration Camps”
(Kearny Street Workshop, 2001), and “Making Home from War: Stories of Japanese American Exile and Resettlement” (Heyday, 2011). “Topaz” was published by Four Way Books in 2013.

• “In a voice thickened with stoical regret, from a body charged with sexuality and grief, Dempster writes a poetry like no other’s.”
  — Garrett Hongo

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Pricing effective as of July 2014.