Poetry

White Flash/Black Rain

Women of Japan Relive the Bomb
“Tough-minded and urgent.” —NEW YORK TIMES
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In White Flash/Black Rain—hailed as “tough-minded and urgent” by the New York Times— women survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki write of the attack’s cause, effects, and aftermath. Their voices refute the idea that the devastation unleashed ended with the war; their words echo the refrain that its ravages live on in body and soul, in victim and victor.

In potent prose and poetry, these women bear witness to the shared responsibility for bringing about war, any war. They retell the unspeakable mass destruction inflicted by the United States when it dropped the bomb; they recall the disastrous path Japan followed with its policy of conquest and Emperorism in Korea and China; they recount the abuse of the “comfort women” used by Japanese soldiers.

Throughout this powerful anthology, their message is clear: this must never happen again.

ISBN
9781571314024
Publish Date
Pages
136
Dimensions
6 × 9 × 0.38 in
Weight
7.1 oz

Praise and Prizes

  • “An extraordinary document that should be read by all men and women who still idealize warfare as heroic, a powerful summons to complete the transformation from a dominator to a partnership world.”

    Riane Eisler
    author of The Chalice and the Blade
  • “From haiku to memorial to vivid testimony to an excerpt from a children’s book, this is a searingly beautiful collection… . Highly recommended.”

    Library Journal
  • “Unsettling … The issues around the possibility of the use of nuclear weapons continue to confront all of the earth’s peoples. This is a powerful voice in opposition to it.”

    KLIATT
  • “Shattering! Profound. Stops the heart at every phrase.”

    Belle Yang
    author of A Nest in Springtime
  • “In these pages the catastrophe of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings is given human voice in a wide range of powerfully moving accounts by those who have seen the unseeable, lived the unlivable.”

    Jane Hirshfield
    editor and cotranslator of The Ink Dark Moon