Unmothered, Untongued: Lyric Essays

unMothered, unTongued is a collection of lyric essays written from the liminal space of the in-between. These essays thread themselves around questions of language, landscape, and identity, weaving together intersectionalities and intertextualities. Author Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh, a biracial LGBTQIA+ Nisei who was born and raised in Laramie, Wyoming, to a non-native-English-speaking Issei mother, considers not only the tensions in the rifts between intersectional identities (biracial Nisei, LGBTQIA+) but also the tensions between marginalized identities and the landscapes and cultures of the American West; the tensions between nonnative, second, erased, and/or forgotten languages; and the tensions between those who abuse and those who survive. These rifts, intersections, and fractures, while frequently a source of violence and immense grief, are also a source of illumination and clarity. The essays in this collection are written almost entirely in hybrid/lyric forms--oftentimes braided, oftentimes patchworked, oftentimes segmented--reflecting some of the fractured complexities and intersections of Horikoshi Roripaugh’s own hybrid identities.

LEE HORIKOSHI RORIPAUGH (she/they) is a biracial Nisei and the author of five volumes of poetry, most recently tsunami vs. the fukushima 50, a Best Book of 2019 by the New York Public Library and a poetry finalist in the 2020 Lambda Literary Awards. Her fiction collection, Reveal Codes, winner of the Moon City Press Short Fiction Award, was published by Moon City Press in 2023, and their chapbook, #stringofbeads, was published by Diode Press in 2023. A recipient of the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award in Poetry/Prose for 2004 and a 1998 winner of the National Poetry Series, Horikoshi Roripaugh’s poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Story Magazine, Terrain.org, Hotel Amerika, and North American Review, among other publications. Seven of their essays have been listed as Notable Essays in Best American Essays.