Aisha Fukushima’s Mostly Water – Reading & Reception

Join us for a reading and reception to celebrate Aisha Fukushima’s new book, Mostly Water. Presented by the Yuri Kochiyama Solidarity Project, in collaboration with the Rare Book & Manuscript Library (RBML) at Columbia University.

Mostly Water is a poetry collection born from years of navigating social norms that fail to capture what it means to be mixed. Drawing on her lived experiences as a Black and Japanese person growing up between the U.S. and Japan, Aisha Fukushima explores what it means to live from mixed roots. Moving through her grandmother’s kitchen, hair salons, and post-WWII Afro-Japanese histories, Fukushima challenges narrow frameworks around racial belonging. Here, abundance replace the racialized math of halves and quarters. From micro-aggressions to quiet prayers, each stanza is a lyric within a larger freedom song.

These poems are an opening — an offering for anyone who has ever searched for language spacious enough to hold who they truly are. We are, after all, mostly water — fluid, uncontainable, beyond measure