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Sachiko Murakami

Sachiko Murakami’s first poetry collection, The Invisibility Exhibit, was a finalist for the Governer General’s Award for Poetry and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. She has been a literary worker for various publishers, magazines and organizations, and is a past member of Vancouver’s Kootenay School of Writing collective. She lives in Toronto where she co-hosts the Pivot Reading Series.

She also initiated ProjectRebuild.ca, an online collaborative poetry project in which anyone can “move in” to any poem on the site. ProjectRebuild.ca began with a single poem, “Vancouver Special,” from her collection Rebuild; within three months of launching, the site grew to nearly two hundred poems.

December 2011 : Talonbooks Presents Karl and Christy Siegler's Farewell Bash

September 2011 : Sachiko Murakami's Launch of Rebuild in Toronto

September 2011 : Word on the Street Vancouver, 2011

August 2011 : Uniform Landscapes / Hybrid Dialogue

July 2011 : In Piazza San Domenico, Ordinary Time, and Rebuild are here!

July 2011 : Move into Project Rebuild - A Poetry Project Initiated by Sachiko Murakami

February 2011 : A Recommendation for The Invisibility Exhibit

June 2010 : Scream

AUTHOR AWARDS

Governor General’s Poetry Award finalist (2008), The Invisibility Exhibit.

BOOK AWARDS

Finalist for the 2008 Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry

QUOTES OF NOTE

"Did this happen, here? Did this/ really happen to me?" Such a devastated hole gapes in narrative before a moment of potent reconfiguration, and it’s quite ­genius of Sachiko Murakami’s new collection, Rebuild, to pose a doubled speaker of agape grief: both the narrator who has lost a father in troubling circumstances, and the contemporary development-manic city itself, specifically glass-pocked Vancouver, lamenting its gutted and guttered wholeness (acknowledging that wholeness is a myth, yet another hole). —Margaret Christakos

These are angry poems. Proud and angry. But smart and quirky, too, daring us to tear up our death pledge to real estate, and rethink our citizenship in scandalous cities. They ask hard questions about democracy, Olympic extravaganzas, police battalions and single feet that wash up on the beach. What is home in a state where the cost of a house would feed whole villages for years? […] Murakami brings us home to our senses. —Meredith Quartermain

The poems in Rebuild strike at (the crack in) the heart of Vancouver. […] Murakami’s poetry performs erasure on itself, tries to renovate and rebuild. Something faster. Something better. Tears out consonant and vowel, post and beam, with dishwasher, writes elegy, writes condo, writes missing, writes return. Returns to scaffolding, to consonant, to the letters of her dead father’s name. —Nikki Reimer

QUOTES OF NOTE

“Here is one woman’s fiercely intelligent response to one of society’s most tragic and pressing dilemmas. Murakami reveals and dismantles the rhetoric of the all-too-familiar missing woman narrative. The Invisibility Exhibit is an articulate and expertly rendered protest against the violence of erasure.”

— Jon Paul Fiorentino

“Sachiko Murakami’s poems transcend the topical to achieve a startling and personal emotional resonance. Reading them, we become at once wiser and more questioning, sadder and more hopeful. A risky, and deeply rewarding, first collection.”

— Stephanie Bolster

“ The Invisibility Exhibit is an assembly of fine details and drawn connections, as painstaking as it is provocative.”

— Toronto Star

“The final poem of the collection insists ‘What gentleness we must muster now, to lift DNA // from a microscopic edge, to protect / the whole of the woman contained there.’ Murakami’s collection succeeds in embodying this gentleness, along with a startling poetic sensitivity and strength.”

— Matrix

“Murakami is a tightly wound spring finally sprung, releasing ohms of energy and lighting the world of Canadian poetry with a new ampere. She has vaulted into prominence with this her first book.”

— Prairie Fire