The Poet and the Silk Girl: A Memoir of Love, Imprisonment, and Protest

A daring and prismatic memoir of one family's defiance in the face of injustice--and their story's echoes across generations.

In 1942 newlyweds Itaru and Shizuko Ina were settling into married life when the United States government upended their world. Branded enemy aliens on account of their Japanese ancestry, they were forcibly removed from their home and incarcerated in the complex of American concentration camps dotting the West. Born to Itaru and Shizuko during their imprisonment., psychotherapist and activist Satsuki Ina weaves together diary entries, photographs, clandestine correspondences, and heart-wrenching haiku--and she reveals how one young couple navigated life, love, loss, and loyalty tests in the welter of World War II-era hysteria.

As she traces the legacies of trauma, Ina connects her family's ordeal to modern-day mass incarceration at the US-Mexico border. She recounts the efforts of her parents and their Japanese American peers who resisted racist oppression, fought for restoration of their rights as citizens, and clung to their full humanity under extreme duress. With psychological insight, The Poet and the Silk Girl excavates the unmentionable, recovering a chronicle of resilience amidst one of the severest blows to American civil liberties. Lyrical and gripping, this cautionary tale implores us to prevent the repetition of atrocity, pairing healing and protest with galvanizing power.