Okaerinasai

"Tony Wallin Sato is indeed one of the young contemporary poets for whom Whitman has stopped somewhere and happily waited." -Bill Mohr

A collection of Zen infused poetry reflecting on the author's experience with incarceration and his encounters with others in the carceral state. What imprisons us, and what makes us free is a theme that runs like a wild river through the poems and prose of this collection.

"Okaerinasai" which roughly translates as "welcome back home" weaves together Wallin-Sato's adventures as a young Japanese-American in California struggling with addiction to his redemptive adult work as a "re-entry" advocate for the formerly incarcerated. A series of riveting accounts of "gate pickups" when the author and his network greet former prisoners in their first hours of freedom, form a cinematic backdrop to meditations on Dogen's Zen teachings and lyric reflections on the wilderness of California's North Coast.

The confined and the limitless, play differing chords in Wallin-Sato's poetry, infused in equal parts with the transcendence of the natural world and the injustice of our urban streets. Echos of Basho, and Bukowski sound through the work, with a powerful breadth of language that remains at its heart a fierce reparation for all that is false and broken.