Introduction to Reader

    Assembling the reader was especially hard because of Okita's lack of more poems. I had initially expected this to be an easier process, given that he has only twenty nine published poems. However, it was actually more difficult to capture the various emotions and themes of his work within eight poems. Though all of his poems are open form, they differ in tone and topic. In this collection, I have compiled the poems by recurring theme, ordering them according to progression in emotion and subject.

    All these poems represent the many facets of Okita's style. "Suburban Graffiti" has the dry humor that is found in his other works. I placed it as the first poem because of its introduction to Okita's voice. Like most of his other poems, there are many personal pronouns. All of Okita's pieces are personal accounts; he writes only of experiences that have impacted his life. In this way, "Suburban Graffiti" introduces Okita as a confessional poet, never using a fictional persona to tell a story. It should be noted that "In Response to Executive Order 9066…" was written from his mother's point of view as a fourteen year-old girl. This, however, remains the only exception in which Okita adopts another identity. Even in this case, it is a persona with which he is familiar; it is not fictional.

    The next couple poems are linked by the theme of love. "Poem for the Unnamed" is similar to the others he writes as it concerns everyday acts, common events that are not necessarily profound until examined. This poem concerns parental love and care for a child, contrasted to the sexual love found in the following two poems. "My Parents:: How They Met" also earns a place in the reader because it is the only rhyming poem in Okita's published collection. Its use of quotations is a characteristic commonly employed in his poems about his mother's internment experience. These "love" poems also introduce the pronoun you, a style that Okita uses to make the poems more direct for the reader. His poems invite the reader into the stories.

    "Kitchen" and "Facing the Mannequin" are two poems that reflect the notion of exclusion. "Kitchen" literally does not fit in with the rest of Okita's poems, as there is no first person narrative present. The woman does not belong in the "kitchen"; she is trapped like the plastic doll in "Facing the Mannequin."

    Finally, there are the "path" poems. These poems tie in with the title of Okita's book, Crossing with the Light. Many of his poems contain this "movement" imagery of walking, running, or crossing into a new path. As the speaker in "We're Given a Father for Such a Short Time" talks to his father about arriving "some place else", "Etch-a-Sketch" conveys the idea of shaking away the past. Both convey the message of embracing the future, stepping over a threshold to experience something new.

    These poems hardly capture Okita's range of tone. However, they do capture his style of enjambed prose lines filled with artistic imagery. His poems are intimate. In reading through the book, each work is a snapshot of Okita's memories at that moment in time. Some of these events were more significant than others, yet all impacted his life in some way.