Aileen Fedullo is a young American poet whose observations of people and life in Tokyo over the past decade ("Plastic seasons scraping against eyes") have been sometimes acerbic, often passionate, always penetrating and more often than not jotted down in coffee shops.
Meeting in a coffee shop in Ebisu, Tokyo, I'm wondering on what her eyes are alighting -- raw material for a creative process wholly her own. For Aileen is not the kind of poet who dashes off verses as one-off spiritual exorcisms. Rather she is the constant (for which read unrelenting) revisionist.
Aileen has always used words and punctuation with infinite care. She thinks it a dedication born out of respect for a feisty grandmother who wrote a monthly column called "The Woodlander" for The Pike Country Dispatch. "She'd tell me stories, just as I told fairy tales to my youngest brother. I was 16 when he was born -- served up, like me, on Staten Island, N.Y."