Cathedral
We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration

31 Letters and 13 Dreams

Each letter is written from a specific place that Hugo has made his own (a “triggering town,” as he has called it elsewhere) to a friend, a fellow poet, an old love.

We read over the poet’s shoulder as the town triggers the imagination, the friendship is re-opened, the poet’s selfhood is explored and illuminated.

The “dreams” turn up unexpectedly (as dreams do) among the letters; their haunting images give further depth to the poet’s exploration.

Are we overhearing them?

Who is the “you” that dreams?

More Adult, Non-Juvenile Books

  • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A PARADE BEST BOOK OF ALL TIME • From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner—a powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity that asks questions about race, class, and gender with characteristic subtlety and grace. “So precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry”—The New York Times In Morrison’s acclaimed first novel, Pecola Breedlove—an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others—prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look [...]
  • A stunning novel of hopes and dreams, guilt and love—a book that offers a resonant new definition of what it means to be American and "illuminates the lives behind the current debates about Latino immigration" (The New York Times Book Review).
  • Burn Book by Kara Swisher
    From award-winning journalist Kara Swisher comes a witty, scathing, but fair accounting of the tech industry and its founders who wanted to change the world but broke it instead.
  • The Cemetery of Untold Stories by Julia Alvarez
    In The Cemetery of Untold Stories, Alma Cruz inherits a plot of land in the Dominican Republic, where she decides to create a graveyard for her untold stories and the characters that haunt her. As these characters begin to assert their voices, Alma must confront the question of whose stories get told and whose remain buried, ultimately discovering that stories are never truly finished.