Still Out of Place

Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. Hawaiian Studies. STILL OUT OF PLACE, poems by Christy Passion, is a powerful collection that explores a life lived in Hawai'i, rich with cultural heritage that few others have really captured. Tough and unflinching, compassionate and beautifully crafted, this is a sharp-eyed, singular portrait of island life. It's working class. It resists nostalgia. It shows that there can be a beauty in the everyday pain that blue- collar people endure. Passion is a sensory magician, her words an incantation that manifests all that is darkness and light and broken and beautiful in Hawai'i. Honoring a world of fishermen and glass floaters, old train tracks and Sand Island weekends, these poems are both raw and exquisitely crafted. They are love poems—love of home, love of the father, even love of strangers in hospital beds. Passion looks unflinchingly at what is broken in this world and what, happily for all of us, remains. Funny, moving, and, like the loved ones in these poems, heartbreaking and fearless, STILL OUT OF PLACE is an impressive debut.