Yesterday's Dawns: Poetry of Avi Sato

You are darkness. You are light. If you think, these poems are an odd to you, a guiding track for new ideas and to set your dreams on a path to self-discovery.While prose leads you in search of escape, following a story from beginning to end, poetry is your story told through someone else's eyes, tasted by another's tongue, kept awake by a stranger's half-sleeping nightmares but far more personal for all that.If you ever wonder if there's an alternative to living by today's rules of laziness and inaction, drunken nationalism and hate, you may find your answer in these pages. This book is a contemporary interpretation of traditional Japanese poetry, not the haiku you learned in school but a more contemporary way or taking the simple lines, the few syllables of a line and creating contrast, meaning and a single snapshot of a moment before moving on to another.Some poems tell stories, others tell thoughts, still others talk of a future that's already been decided but can still be changed. Perhaps here you will discover yourself in words you never dreamed to use.On the back...whisper joyful thoughtsinto a silence that surroundsthe unspoken wordsbelieve tomorrowit is not simply todayendlessly repeateda daydreambecomes as peacefulas nightfalldawn of new beginningsshimmers just out of my reachuntil yesterdayAbout the author...Avi... is a teacher and writer, one who desires to live outside the boundaries of a society lost to the artifice of equality trampled by misogyny, racism, and sexualized oppression, one who lives apart from the constructions of gender identity while crying for the necessity of that existence being apart from a world in fragments because of its unwillingness to shed its traditional attachment to manufactured roles.... has lived and studied between canada's east and west coasts, composing poetry on the shores of the atlantic and pacific, holding dear within the heart the solitude that comes from standing at the edge of land with feet no longer willing to turn back toward humanity's lost humanity.... is a proponent of art as an unrelenting walk along the pathway of beauty where ideas and thoughts and reality and existence take secondary role to language as a conduit for the simple pleasure of words living for their capacity to take the listener, the reader, even the writer to new worlds deep not in their knowledge but in their pure escape into beauty itself.in thought truth may arriveor perhaps it remains absentyet without a desire to knowlies shall be your only sanctuary