With deadpan humor and the Surrealist’s combination of clarity and incongruity, Sawako Nakayasu’s book of prose poems, The Ants, makes a tiny insect the center of the world.—Jennifer Kronovet for the Boston Review

The Ants is a study not of, but through, ants. In a dashing sequence of prose pieces, Sawako Nakayasu takes the human to the level of the ant, and the ant to the level of the human. Prima facie, The Ants is a catalogue of insect observations and observations of insects. But the exposé of insect life humbles and disrupts the myopia that is human life, where experience is seen in its most raw and animal form and human “nouveau-ambitious” and “free-thinking” lifestyles become estranged, uncovered, and humbled. Found in dumpling soups and remembered in childhood vignettes, these ants trail through what Nakayasu describes as the “industry of survival,” exploring interfaces of love, ambition, and strategy. The danger is not in sentiment, but rather, in a gash, a wall, an argument, an intention. Is it more lonely to be crushed into the core of a non-mechanical pencil, to be isolated in the safety of home, or to “find” “it” “all” at the very very last moment? The Ants is the distance, the break, and the tenuous wilderness between exoskeleton and endoskeleton, and Nakayasu puts her finger on it, and it, and it.

This title is a new and expanded edition released as part of punctum’s Special Collections project, containing additionally seventeen bilingual English–Japanese poems from the chapbook Insect Country E: Bilingual Insects.

About the First Edition

• Jennifer Kronovet, Review of The Ants by Sawako Nakayasu, Boston Review.
• Emily-Jo Hopson, Review of The Ants by Sawako Nakayasu, Pank.
• Kevin O’Sullivan, Review of The Ants by Sawako Nakayasu, Medium.
• Julia Bouwsma, Review of The Ants by Sawako Nakayasu, Connotation Press.
• Michelle Dove, Review of The Ants by Sawako Nakayasu, Small Press Book Review.
• Tan Lin, Review of The Ants by Sawako Nakayasu, The Brooklyn Rail.

About the Author

Sawako Nakayasu is an artist working with language, performance, and translation, separately and combined. Recent books include Pink Waves (Omnidawn, 2023), a finalist for the PEN/Voelcker award, Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From (Wave Books, 2020), and the pamphlet, Say Translation Is Art (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020). Translations include The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa (Modern Library, 2020), as well as Mouth: Eats Color – Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-translations, & Originals (Rogue Factorial, 2011), a multilingual work of both original and translated poetry. Settle Her, which was written on the #1 bus line in Providence on Thanksgiving Day of 2017, on the occasion of Sawako cutting ties with normative Thanksgiving celebrations, is forthcoming from Solid Objects. She teaches poetry, translation, and interdisciplinary art in the Literary Arts department at Brown University.