amp34The Afterlife Is Letting Go is a meditative consideration of Japanese American incarceration during WWII by Brandon Shimoda author of the PEN Open Book Awardwinning The Grave on the Wall.amp34Matt Seidel Publishers Weeklys amp34Big Indie Books of Fall 2024amp34amp10amp34Both personal and choral The Afterlife is Letting Go is deeply felt precise and as generous in its insights as it is unsparing in its critiques of how exclusion zones proliferate and reach across time and space. A stirring trenchant and necessary work.amp34amp8212Christina Sharpe author of Ordinary NotesIn a series of reflective multilayered sometimes multivoiced essays poet Brandon Shimoda explores the afterlife of the U.S. governments forced removal and mass incarceration of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans during WWII excavating the ways these events continue to resonate today. What emerges is a panoramic yet intimate portrait of intergenerational trauma and healing.Informed by personalfamilial history years of research and travel including visits to museums memorials and the ruins of incarceration sites these essays take us on both a physical and a metaphysical journey. What becomes increasingly clear are the infinite connections between the treatment of Japanese Americans and other forms of oppression criminalization dispossession and state violence enacted by the United States past present and ongoing.