
Kazuko Shiraishi
A Japanese poet born in Vancouver in 1931, Shiraishi’s family moved to Japan shortly before the war. As a teenager, she was involved in the surrealist VOU group, and later became known as Japan’s leading Beat poet, reading her poems to jazz, and championing artistic, spiritual, and sexual expression. New Directions published Seasons of Sacred Lust, edited by Kenneth Rexroth, in 1975; Let Those Who Appear in 2002; and My Floating Mother, City in 2009.