Mary Jo Bang, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and her fellow poet and translator Yuki Tanaka present the first collection in English of Shuzo Takiguchi’s poetry: A Kiss for the Absolute (Princeton University Press, 2024). These ingenious, playful, and erotic poems will be read in their original Japanese and in English. Following the reading, the two distinguished poets will discuss A Kiss for the Absolute and the translation process.

Presented in partnership with the Asian American Writers Workshop.

Readings in Kray Hall with a reception to follow in the Viscusi Reading Room.

About the Poets:

Mary Jo Bang is the author of nine books of poems—including Elegy, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her most recent book, A Film in Which I Play Everyone (Graywolf Press 2023), was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award, a PEN Voelcker Award, and the Heartland Booksellers Award. She’s published translations of Dante’s Inferno, illustrated by Henrik Drescher, and Purgatorio. Her translation of Paradiso is forthcoming in July 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—forthcoming from Princeton University Press in November 2024. She’s been the recipient of a Hodder Fellowship, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin. She is a Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis.

Born and raised in Yamaguchi, Japan, Yuki Tanaka is the author of a 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. 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.