Miho Nonaka’s The Museum of Small Bones offers, through classical lyrical narrative, an understanding of interpersonal origin, family, and memory. Nonaka integrates personal reflection and ancestral experience with ease and grace. Through celebration and sensitivity, the poems detail the narrator’s source of self and a “curious extension/ of the soul.“

In poems such as “Through the Willows”  Nonaka gives blessings to nature, including the nature of the human heart and the nature of transience: 

“Bless my crush and his ugly uniform, 

one of its golden buttons closest to

  his heart

Bless the city we kept dreaming of leaving 

yet neither of us can return now” ... 

”The Production of Silk” is a prose poem in thirty sections, and acts as a centrepiece, compromising part-two of the three-part collection. Nonaka’s vehicle of the ‘heavenly worm’ grounds the collection in Nonaka’s family history, wherein her ancestors were silk farmers.  These abundant accounts are clear, detailed, to provide cultural insights to tradition, including literary traditions. The poem also depicts an accurate and scientific overlay to the querant’s observations on silk farming. The combination of this approach, through action and gesture, create of a subtle otherworldly effect on the reader, adding appreciation for an exposure to unfamiliar concepts (unless you are familiar silk farming): 

“My three silkworms shed their skin multiple times. They graduated from a small fish cracker box to the jewel case that once held my mother’s pearl necklace.

That summer was unbearably hot, especially in the basin-shaped city of Hachioji. With our AC broken, I worried that my worms would not survive; the heat and humidity of July would stifle the imperceptible breath coming through their nine tiny nostrils along each side.” 

The shedding of skin, the heat, and the understated urgency for survival are encased in detail, both through external inspections and internal ruminations.

In section ten of the poem “Dream Tree,” Nonaka writes:

“I won’t say I miss the tree and its song, a nostalgia for half-remembered dreams. Never since have I felt so spoken to, so close to another soul.”  

In Miho Nonaka’s collection, the reader travels a narrative autobiography rich with unique extractions.  The poems themselves document mindful experiences of a soul blossoming open through memory, connection and considerations to amplify a wider universe.