I Saw

A mother carries her sleeping child through the cold streets, selling evening newspapers. Farmers’ carts awaken the night with their wooden clatter. A white dog appears at the door, and stars transform a winter tree into a mysterious underwater world.

In I Saw, Senge Motomaro discovers extraordinary feeling in ordinary encounters. His first poetry collection moves between the joys and strains of family life, the hardship of strangers, and the changing light of spring and winter. Children, prisoners, workers and animals enter poems that ask how love can become action and how happiness can coexist with suffering.

The poems are candid, compassionate and sometimes unsettling. Moments of delight lead into self-questioning; images of universal harmony meet the realities of poverty and loneliness.