"I longed to become / a jellyfish, Miho Nonaka writes, so transparent no one / could tell my body / from the water I swim in . . . The self wants both to emerge and to hide, to disappear and to be known. Who could have taught me to stay at home in my own body, she asks, all the while I traveled from one country to another . . . ? Nonaka's position as a citizen of two cultures and many cities, one who is either always outside or else at home everywhere, allows her poems to turn language, body, gender and world like faceted gems, looking into their depths with irony, sorrow, and the endless curiosity voiced here by both poet and silkworm: How is it that I am here? Where does this appetite lead, if hunger points beyond its immediate end?" -- Mark Doty

Miho Nonaka is a bilingual poet from Tokyo. Her poems and essays have appeared in various journals and anthologies, including Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Southern Review, Tin House, American Odysseys: Writings by New Americans and Helen Burns Poetry Anthology: New Voices from the Academy of American Poets. She is an associate professor of English and creative writing at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois.

"I longed to become / a jellyfish, Miho Nonaka writes, so transparent no one / could tell my body / from the water I swim in . . . The self wants both to emerge and to hide, to disappear and to be known. Who could have taught me to stay at home in my own body, she asks, all the while I traveled from one country to another . . . ? Nonaka's position as a citizen of two cultures and many cities, one who is either always outside or else at home everywhere, allows her poems to turn language, body, gender and world like faceted gems, looking into their depths with irony, sorrow, and the endless curiosity voiced here by both poet and silkworm: How is it that I am here? Where does this appetite lead, if hunger points beyond its immediate end?" — Mark Doty, American poet, the winner of the National Book Award for Poetry.

"What a delight to read Miho Nonaka's poems! Her ancestors were silk farmers and she herself is drawn to small things. These small things grow in her poetry; she's doing something extraordinary—she is a mediator between the two great traditions, the Japanese and the Western. And all this without any fuss, only through concreteness of images, through honest observation!" — Adam Zagajewski, Polish poet, novelist, translator, and essayist.

"In these poems we find not only that which we can contain, but that which may contain us. Perhaps we turn to poems for the same reason we continue to frequent museums and collect shells and rocks and other small ordinary treasures: to find the self, yes, but to find the point from which we depart the self, become separate from and more than the singular self." — Abigail Chabitnoy, Colorado State University Center for Literary Publishinghttps://coloradoreview.colostate.edu/reviews/the-museum-of-small-bones/