by Lisa Linn Kanae
Islands Linked by Ocean is more than a collection of Hawai‘i-based short stories: It’s the verbal equivalent of a heavy, glossy coffee table book full of in-the-moment images imbued with a unique elegance and wonder by the artist who captured them. Lisa Linn Kanae conjures frame after frame, many familiar to most of us, but in a light that brings out a grace we never knew existed: a veteran steersman berating his novice stroker, the banter and gossip of women in an office breakroom, a starving dog tied to a chain-link fence behind a dumpster. My own favorite is the title story which ironically contains the least amount of fiction maybe because I, too, had a McKinley-alum dad who could croon like Dean Martin. And I never realized how beautifully he did so until I read Kanae’s work about her own father.
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The Hawai’i Review of Books, THROB, could be a place thinking people congregate for pleasure. It certainly is big and fresh to look at. THROB actually invites reading. Site metrics show they’re getting thousands of hits and people are spending time reading on the site.
THROB is the brainchild of writer and editor Don Wallace. Author of four books, Wallace has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and he s currently contributing editor at the Honolulu Magazine.
Last year, as he was receiving the 2020 Loretta Petrie Award for outstanding service to literature, Wallace said he was going to start an online literary magazine. That s why acceptance speeches are sometimes worth listening to.
Noe Tanigawa covers art, culture, and ideas for Hawai i Public Radio. Noe began working in news at WQXR, the New York Times classical station in New York City, where she also hosted music programs from 1990-94. Prior to New York, Noe was a music host in jazz, rock, urban contemporary, and contemporary and classic Hawaiian music formats in Honolulu. Since arriving at HPR in 2002, Noe has received awards from the Los Angeles Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists Hawai i Chapter, and an Edward R. Murrow Regional Award for coverage of the budget process at the Hawai i State Legislature. Noe holds a Masters in Painting from UH Mānoa. She maintains an active painting practice, and has recently returned from a 2015 residency with the U.S. Art in Embassies program in Palau. Noe is from Wailupe Valley in East O ahu.
May 6, 2021
Every now and then an author reaches out to the
Quarterly and asks that we share their work on our website. While it’s impossible to share every author’s work, this almost always nudges me back to look at an author’s contribution again.
Last week, Kelvin Kellman reached out about his poem “Black Woman,” which prompted me to re-read it. It’s pretty great and to help the author share his work more broadly (especially as an African writer it’s just a bit trickier for him to get copies of the
Quarterly into his readers’ hands!), here is his poem. It originally appears in 87.3/4.