The poems in I Weave a Nest of Foil unfold like a beautifully awry fairy tale populated by ghosts, untranslated histories, palimpsests, warnings, and manifold wonders which even all the darkness they portray cannot erase. A classroom preparing for mass shootings - the latticed, shiny scars of the human body - the community effects of the pandemic - our recent history is woven into this glittering work and made strangely nurturing there. A book of memory and perception, family, and nature.

Arlene Naganawa's work appears in The Inflectionist Review, La Piccioletta Barca, Whale Road Review, Fatal Flaw, Thimble, Barnstorm, Belletrist, Crab Creek Review, Crab Orchard Review, Waxwing, Calyx, New Delta Review, Poetry on Buses, and in other publications.

Her chapbooks include Private Graveyard (Gribble Press), The Scarecrow Bride (Red Bird Chapbooks), The Ark and the Bear (Floating Bridge Press), and We Were Talking About When We Had Bodies (Ravenna Press).

Arlene has been the recipient of grants from the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture and Artist Trust and was awarded a creative residency at Bloedel Reserve on Bainbridge Island, WA, and served as a juror for the 2024 poetry residency.

Arlene has been a Writer in the Schools for Seattle Arts and lectures, instructor at Hugo House, poetry mentor and site lead for the Pongo Poetry Project at Judge Patricia H. Clark Children and Family Justice Center, and poetry teacher at Echo Glen Children's Center in Snoqualmie, Washington.

"My first chapbook, Private Graveyard, was the winner of a contest. I was stunned that it was chosen and it encouraged me to keep writing. The work in that first chapbook is somewhat different from the writing in subsequent books. I was writing more personally then. My new work is often, but not always, fragmented, ekphrastic, and collage-like. I use a persona almost always now." - Rob Mclennan