SOURCE: Matsumoto, Valerie. Review of Desert Run: Poems and Stories, by Mitsuye Yamada. Woman's Review of Books 6, nos. 10-11 (July 1989): 5.

In the following excerpted review, Matsumoto positively assesses the meditative poetry and female-centered short stories of Yamada's Desert Run, with particular emphasis on their relation to Japanese-American life in the mid-twentieth century.

There is a world I grew up with, the world of my family and fictive kin, composed of myriad threads of shared understanding rituals, jokes. We ate raw fish and seaweed, “to make your hair black” or “to put hair on your chest” (depending on my father's mood), and savored tortillas rolled around potatoes and pork as did the Hispanic farm workers in the tomato fields. My childhood in the Imperial Valley of Southern California was punctuated by visits to my paternal grandparents in Los Angeles—the largest Japanese-American concentration on the US mainland—and to...