Tagged: Angela Yuriko Smith

Epeolatry Book Review: Inujini by Angela Yuriko Smith

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Title: Inujini
Author: Angela Yuriko Smith
Genre: historical Asian fiction, literary fiction, historical literary fiction
Publisher: Yuriko Publishing
Release Date: 23rd June, 2024

Synopsis: Three indigenous Ryukyuan girls are stripped of everything in a war their people will gain nothing from, except loss. As they struggle to survive, they learn the power of resilience lies in connecting with who they were, who they are and who they will be together.

Kaori, Yuki and Shigeko are three island girls on the edge of womanhood who find themselves trapped in a fictionalized Battle of Okinawa. Based on true events, the three girls endure hunger, injury, humiliation and gender based violence as everything they love is stripped from them.

They each survive parallel story arcs that entwine in the last act as they connect to their intuition, in the form of the shiisaa guardians specific to Okinawa, and each other. Shamanistic magic may be what brings them together, but in the end it’s the girls themselves that wind up being the heroines. Their sisterhood is what defies and defeats those that threaten them.

Trigger warning: Sexual violence is an essential part of the plot to represent the real life situation women in Okinawa face to this day, but there are no graphic depictions of the act in this story. It remains only a threat to the characters.

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Epeolatry Book Review: Unquiet Spirits: Essays by Asian Women in Horror ed. Lee Murray and Angela Yuriko Smith

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Our reviews may contain affiliate links. If you purchase something through the links in this article we may receive a small commission or referral fee. This happens without any additional cost to you.

Title: Unquiet Spirits: Essays by Asian Women in Horror
Author: Various, ed. Lee Murray and Angela Yuriko Smith
Publisher: Black Spot Books
Genre: Non-fiction
Release Date: 14th February, 2023

Synopsis: From hungry ghosts, vampiric babies, and shapeshifting fox spirits to the avenging White Lady of urban legend, for generations, Asian women’s roles have been shaped and defined through myth and story. In Unquiet Spirits, Asian writers of horror reflect on the impact of superstition, spirits, and the supernatural in this unique collection of 21 personal essays exploring themes of otherness, identity, expectation, duty, and loss, and leading, ultimately, to understanding and empowerment.

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WIHM 2022: An Interview With Editor Angela Yuriko Smith

In celebration of Women in Horror Month, we are continuing to highlight some of the amazing work that women have been doing compiling and editing magazines and story collections in the horror industry. We’re continuing our Women Who Edit Interview series with Angela Yuriko Smith.

 

Could you introduce yourself, and tell us a little about you?

Sure, and thanks for having me here! Most of my life has been spent writing non-fiction for newspapers, online lifestyle and marketing. I moved into fiction in 2011 as the result of an argument at a writers conference. As a nonfiction writer I was offended to overhear a man declaring that nonfiction writers couldn’t do fiction because they had no imagination. I disagreed, my point being you had to be creative about what information you shared or you wind up with dull work no one will read. He disagreed that writing for a newspaper was just reciting facts, not creating worlds. I disagreed, he disagreed… we wound up in a yelling match in the hallway and were told we’d be kicked out of the conference if we didn’t calm down. We did, but that night I went home and started writing End of Mae to prove him wrong. It took me about 8 years to finish that novella but I give the victory to that loud, opinionated man. I think I proved I had an imagination, but he converted me to fiction in the process. Well played, sir.

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Guest Post: Tortured Willows—Bent. Bowed. Unbroken Angela Yuriko Smith’s Sneak Peek

  1. Guest Post: Tortured Willows—Bent. Bowed. Unbroken Lee Murray’s Sneak Peek
  2. Guest Post: Tortured Willows—Bent. Bowed. Unbroken Geneve Flynn’s Sneak Peek
  3. Guest Post: Tortured Willows—Bent. Bowed. Unbroken Christina Sng’s Sneak Peek
  4. Guest Post: Tortured Willows—Bent. Bowed. Unbroken Angela Yuriko Smith’s Sneak Peek

A preview of ‘Tortured Willows—Bent. Bowed. Unbroken’

Angela Yuriko Smith

 

Tortured Willows—Bent. Bowed. Unbroken

Poetry by Christina Sng, Angela Yuriko Smith, Lee Murray, and Geneve Flynn

 

I’m delighted to present Tortured Willows, a collaborative collection of 60 poems exploring otherness, expectation, and tradition. 

 

What began as a deepening of the conversation based on the multi-award-winning anthology Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women became a discovery of a culture silenced and traded. This series of poems opened up a Pandora’s Box for me. I began by writing about how my grandmother lost her name (Yuriko) because Caucasians couldn’t pronounce it. As I scratched the surface of what it means to be Okinawan, or more accurately Uchinanchu, my world pivoted. This is not about a woman losing her voice, but a culture—a people—losing everything. 

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Epeolatry Book Review: Tortured Willows by Lee Murray, Geneve Flynn, Christina Sng, & Angela Yuriko Smith

Disclosure:

Our reviews may contain affiliate links. If you purchase something through the links in this article we may receive a small commission or referral fee. This happens without any additional cost to you.

Title: Tortured Willows: Bent, Bowed, Unbroken
Author: Lee Murray, Angela Yuriko Smith, Christina Sng and Geneve Flynn
Genre: Horror Poetry
Publisher: Yuriko Publishing
Release Date: 7th October, 2021

Synopsis: The willow is femininity, desire, death. Rebirth. With its ability to grow from a single broken branch, it is the living embodiment of immortality. It is the yin that wards off malevolent spirits. It is both revered and shunned.

In Tortured Willows, four Southeast Asian women writers of horror expand on the exploration of otherness begun with the Bram Stoker Award-winning anthology Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women.

Like the willow, women have bent and bowed under the expectations and duty heaped upon them. Like the willow, they endure and refuse to break.

With exquisite poetry, Christina Sng, Angela Yuriko Smith, Lee Murray, and Geneve Flynn invite you to sit beneath the tortured willow’s gravid branches and listen to the uneasy shiver of its leaves.

Before cracking open Tortured Willows: Bent, Bowed, Unbroken, I knew this poetry collection would be honest and raw.  However, I was not prepared for the collection’s level of horror and heartbreak. Throughout this work, it’s evident that the authors opened their veins and bled themselves onto the pages. 

Lee Murray, Geneve Flynn, Christina Sng, and Angela Yukiro Smith weave poetic tales of mental, emotional, and physical abuse against Asian women. The tales end with either the ultimate sacrifice or a rising from the flames. 

News and media talk about prejudices against Asian women. Documentaries delve into the racism and sexism that is sometimes associated with Asian diaspora. Tortured Willows takes us onto a deeper, personal level through poetry regaled to us by Asian women authors who allegorically write about experiences of cruelty from prejudice, tradition, and the patriarchy. Tortured Willows is a haunting outcry that mistreatment of women will no longer be tolerated. The representation of the willow tree symbolizes strength and tenacity. The willow bends against hard blows but never breaks—it continues to bounce back and carry on. 

Tortured Willows is a perfect accompaniment to the award-winning short story collection Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women (edited by Geneve Flynn and Lee Murray) to showcase the need to move beyond antiquated roles of tradition and injustices. 

Lee Murray’s poetry is a quiet, but raw and macabre fury that unrelentingly exposes several hundreds of years of suffering and misery placed upon Asian women. Through this literary form, Murray depicts self-sacrifice as a surrender for expectations, love, and the ideal of acceptance. Her poem “Exquisite” left me in tears.

Pay attention. You think it will not matter, but it will. -Geneve Flynn

Geneve Flynn takes several poetry forms and morphs them into her own. In “Her Gradual Hero”, Flynn uses the sonnet, typically used to express love, to convey gaslighting. “Abridge” is blackout poetry executed in a spectacular fashion, and she exposes us to the pantoum (a Malay poetic form) in “When the Girls Began to Fall”. The creativity breathed into Flynn’s poetry exemplifies her writing strength and talent all the while bringing focus to inequity. Pay special attention to “Mouth, and Feet, and Hands, and Eyes” and “Inheritance”. 

Christina Sng lyrically scripts revenge for mistreatment and murder in her poetry. She is quite gifted with paranormal fiction, and through this collection she shows us that her poetry is as strong as her fiction. Sng’s work is full of sorrow and anger as her female ghosts seek revenge against those who have wronged them through racial and sexist discriminations. 

And finally, Angela Yukiro Smith poetry is a historic and cultural journey through time. Her work shines a light on matriarch celebration and casts shadows over the oppressive patriarchy. Smith’s poetry properly rounds out this full collection to show the unbendable nature of the willow and women. 

Tortured Willows: Bent, Bowed, Unbroken is an eye-opening, soul exposing journey, and a solid continuation of Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women. Both collections demonstrate that women will not go quietly into the night.

out of 5 ravens.

Available from Amazon.