When My Mother is Most Beautiful
Paper: ISBN 978-1-934909-77-5 $18
When My Mother is Most Beautiful, winner of the Loose Translation Award, is at once a powerful love letter to a mother and to language itself, delving into complex questions of family, communication, culture, and connection. These poems chronicle the difficult art of navigating multiple cultural identities, examining how languages twist and morph across cultures through the imperfect act of translation, how they bind people together and keep them apart, and even how they could be reimagined to make a better world.
Rebecca Suzuki is a writer, translator and educator from Nagoya, Japan and Queens, New York. Her writing has appeared in clotheslines, Identity Theory, KBG Bar Lit, Blue Earth Review, among others. She is also a translator from Japanese to English. She earned her MFA in Literary Translation and Creative Writing from Queens College, CUNY and is a lecturer of English there. She lives in New York. When My Mother Is Most Beautiful is winner of the 2023 The Loose Translations Prize, an annual competition sponsored by Queens College, The City University of New York, and Hanging Loose Press, and open to students and alumni of the Queens College MFA program.