Brynn Saito’s Future

Driving with my father / from California through Joshua Tree and on to Arizona,” writes Brynn Saito in her new collection, Under a Future Sky, “I felt the smallness of the human project / against primordial ridge lines and desert seafloor.”

This essay was adapted from the Alta newsletter, delivered every Thursday.
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The Fresno-based poet, professor, and organizer is describing a 2019 pilgrimage she made with her father to the Arizona desert prison camp where her paternal grandparents met during World War II. Saito writes of standing at the ruins of the prison: “Now I hear violins singing / in the barrack bones, eighty years on. Creosote overtakes / the old foundations, its healing spines break concrete.”

In a few deft lines, Saito captures wartime incarceration, generational trauma, Southwest flora, and ancestral memory. “Though the book is very much in conversation with past ancestors, it also is attempting to gesture towards the ancestors of the future,” Saito tells me. Many of her book’s 27 poems are epistolary, poetic letters addressed to her grandparents, father, mother, sister, and future child. (The poem quoted above is for her friend and fellow poet Brandon Shimoda.)

Poet Traci Brimhall calls Saito’s work “an intergenerational archive,” which makes sense: You can feel the award-winning poet moving among time periods and worlds, occasionally venturing into other dimensions. Saito brings the ghosts home.

A professor at Cal State Fresno, Saito was recently recognized by the California Arts Council as a 2023 Individual Artist Fellow for the Central California region.

Though Saito was born in Fresno, she left for about 20 years, living in both the Bay Area and New York City before returning home to teach in the MFA program. She grew up dreaming about becoming a writer with her lifelong friend, the activist, filmmaker, and author Valarie Kaur, who wrote the 2020 book See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love.

Saito credits Fresno’s literary community—which has included writers like Philip Levine, Juan Felipe Herrera, current California poet laureate Lee Herrick, Fresno poet laureate Joseph Rios, Sara Borjas, Anthony Cody, and Mai Der Vang—with benefiting from being “on the edge of different scenes,” she says. “We don’t have anything to lose because it’s Fresno.”

The city’s annual Lit Hop has quietly become one of the West Coast’s best-known literary festivals, and the Fresno poets are, Saito insists, “pushing the boundaries of what a poem can be through documentary and experimental approaches.”

Saito is down-to-earth and unpretentious, fiercely loyal to her longtime friends and family, even as she pushes boundaries with her cutting-edge writing. Her Fresno roots keep her humble as she garners residencies and fellowships. Ultimately, her work honors her ancestors and mentors, like her father, who knows the differences between azaleas, night-blooming lantana, and manzanita.

Another role model is the 100-year-old Japanese American poet Mitsuye Yamada, whom Saito honored in a virtual birthday reading for the San Francisco State University Poetry Center. A poem in Under a Future Sky nods to Yamada, whose 1976 book, Camp Notes, told of her own experience in an Idaho prison camp.

In one of the collection’s final poems, Saito recounts how her grandparents visited her in a dream. “In the horizon dream,” she writes, “my grandparents are finally—in the year 2020— / returning from the desert camp. They drop their suitcases on my / current porch and enter happily, no terror in their seams.” The book, she says, emerged from “this inner drive that we have as artists to write about the things we need to write about just for ourselves.”

Nonetheless, the more Saito wrote, the more she started to feel “the ripples and repercussions.” “The more I went into this history,” she explains, “there was some healing happening on the other side.”•