Takako Arai (Japan, 1966)
By Jeffrey Angles Arai Takako was born in 1966 in Kiryū, a city in central Japan known for textile production.  Arai’s father is the manager of a small, cottage-style weaving factory located on the family property. At its height, the factory employed a few dozen people and produced some of the high quality, finely woven silks that earned an international reputation for the region. Many of Arai’s poems, including many poems in her second and third books in particular, focus on the lives of the women workers she saw so intimately while growing up seeing her father’s factory.  As Arai …