Advance Praise
"After the attack on Pearl Harbor, 120,000 Japanese Americans were rounded up and thrust into prison camps. The harm passes on through the generations, but the effects are not easily identified because elders have shrouded so much of their hurt in protective silence.
Just as Elie Wiesel spoke for the survivors of the Holocaust, Dr. Matsuda in simple, elegant, and heartbreaking poetry gives voice to the silent generations. I hope this beautiful work finds wide readership, so we can heal the wounds of injustice and all say, “Never again.”"
- Barry Grosskopf, MD, Psychiatrist and Author, Hidden in Plain Sight: Getting to the Bottom of Puzzling Emotions
"A Cold Wind from Idaho is the logical next step for Matsuda in his evolution from a community activist to a writer pursuing social justice issues. Because of my internment experience during World War II, the poems brought back memories and gave me another perspective to better understand the tragedy of the Japanese internment."
- Mary Matsuda Gruenwald
"Some pains take lifetimes to assuage. Matsuda’s poems break for us all the Japanese-American code of silence (gaman) toward the indignities of the nine U. S. government-mandated internment camps of WWII like Minidoka in Idaho where Matsuda was born. He not only educates us in the specifics of the suffering of this time, but also brings us into the transgenerational implications of it, connecting this shameful period to both the war in Iraq and the bombing of Hiroshima where one of his relatives survived near ground zero. We have had an appointment with this book for a long time. I’d say it’s an American necessity to read it.
This book moves us to new levels of empathy and seeks to heal the speaker, the Japanese-American community, Japan in its relation to America and this nation itself. I admire its dignity, its ferocious honesty and intimate witnessing of something we thought we knew, but didn’t really know, until he told us.
A lot of books fall into one’s hands in a lifetime.This one has the feel of someone touching history with the courage and ambition to affect it. I receive Matsuda’s narratives about the Japanese Internment Camps with the shame and empathy of a fellow citizen who knows we must never let this happen again—which is the central message of this many layered document written by a modern samurai of the pen. I could not put the book down. It’s why I love poetry: its power to change hearts and to educate our souls."
- Tess Gallagher
