BOOKS
RENDER
Arsenal Pulp Press 2020
Searing, intimate poems that render a history of trauma, addiction, and recovery through dreams and waking experience.
Finalist, Governor-General's Literary Awards, Poetry
GET ME OUT OF HERE
Talonbooks 2015
Why is it often so difficult to stay present in the moment? Poet Sachiko Murakami asked this question in an open call on the Internet, and in airports across the globe, from YVR (Vancouver) to RKV (Reykjavik), people in transit stopped to note in only one sentence their impressions of things, events, people, and feelings. The poems that result from this experiment in crowd-sourcing content search departures and arrivals for a handhold on the fleeting present. Working within and wriggling out of the formal constraint of fourteen lines, Get Me Out of Here explores what poems need to do to stay when the mind is begging to leave.
REBUILD
Talonbooks 2011
Sachiko Murakami approaches the urban centre through its inhabitants' greatest passion: real estate. Rebuild engraves itself on the absence of Vancouver's centre, with its cranes, excavation sites, and bulldozed public spaces. Its poems crumble as the page turns, words flaking from the line like rain-damaged stucco off a leaky condominium, exposing the absence life inside the "stanza" of a despised "Vancouver Special."
“Murakami’s tone is perfect throughout, knowing, shifts from personal to general, from reportage to realtor, from glib to pleading.”
- Nikki Reimer, Lemon Hound
THE INVISIBILITY EXHIBIT
Talonbooks 2008
“The Invisibility Exhibit is an assembly of fine details and drawn connections, as painstaking as it is provocative.”
- Toronto Star
Finalist, Governor-General's Literary Awards, Poetry
Finalist, Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, Best First Book of Canadian Poetry