"What more heartbreaking description of the bomb could anyone fashion? Starting with the striking cover, this book involves you in the strange ironies of history. Fascinating reading."
--John Bradley in The International Examiner's Pacific Reader

"This poetic voice reveals the horrors of the world for which she dreams only of peace. At times it weeps in despair; at other times it sings of hope and promise. It is a treatise of intellectual and social history . . . worthy of the highest recommendation."
--David Andrew Schmidt in Education about Asia

"Moving and powerful poems offering an image of Japan and the Japanese that is all too rarely available."
--W. D. Earhart in Friends Journal

"One of Japan's greatest 20th century poets, [and] one of Japan's bravest and most honest social and literary writers."
--Mark Antony Rossi in Japanophile

"We in the English-speaking world must all stand in debt to Richard Minear for not only calling attention to Kurihara Sadako's poems but also sharing with us their literary luster. Although the defining event of Kurihara's life was the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, her artistry and moral vision extend beyond that moment. She writes of something close to a basic, universal human condition."
--Chris Drake, Atomi College

"This collection of poems by Kurihara Sadako records the fifty-year career of an implacable foe of complacency and forgetfulness in our age of atrocity. Kurihara, who began writing antiwar poems at the outset of the Pacific War and who survived Hiroshima, defies with her work the myth of a monolithic, homogeneous, amnesiac Japan and in so doing she redeems herself and her people. Richard Minear's graceful translations faithfully render her uncompromising, often anguished voice."
--David G. Goodman, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

In 1946, despite the censorship of the American Occupation, Kurihara Sadako published Kuroi tamago (Black Eggs), poems from before, during, and immediately after World War II. This volume includes a translation of Kuroi tamago (the complete edition of 1983), as well as a large selection of her later poems.

Kurihara sets us all at ground zero, strips us down to our basic humanity, and shows us the world both as it is and as it could be. Few poets in any country, indeed, few artists of any kind have displayed a comparable dedication, consistency, and insight.