Explores the many relationships between ecologies and poetries. 
Guest edited by Suga Keijiro.
Editor in Chief: Jeffrey Johnson
Editorial board: Zoria Petkoska K., Marcellus Nealy, Silje Ree, Barbara Summerhawk, Jordan Smith
Copy editors: Jow Waller, Biankah Bailey, Morgan Schulz
Features poetry by: Asra Ran Bjort. Astra Papacristopolou, Yumi Fuzuki, Emi Nakamura, Yaxkin Melchy Ramos-Yupari, Hiroshi Hasebe, Julia Monk, Aki Nagasaka, Adrian Munoz, Naoko Kasama, Satomi Miura, Yuki Masami, Katsumi Okuno, Joaquin Ivars, Barbara Summerhawk. Morgan X. Schulz, Marcellus Nealy, Jeffrey Johnson, Keijiro Suga, Zoria Petkoska K.
Features art by: Erica Ward, Alejandro Nunez, Daisuke Nakajima (including cover art)

ToPoJo Vol.16: EcoPoetry

Tokyo Poetry Journal (ToPoJo) Vol. 15: Visual///Visionary Poetry explores the elusive nature of visual poetry, straddling artistic genres and going beyond language. It includes calligrammes, typewriter art, asemic writing, visual music and architectural drawing poetry.
​​Poetry by Takahiro Sawamura, Smog Lee Shun, Maia Ang, Jey Ley, Florence Ng, Michael Pedersen, fumihito, Volodymyr Bilyk, Jane Joritz-Nakagawa, Anli Chang, Eliza Dune Daiza, Christopher Palmer, Ilias Tsagas, Jessica Rodarte, Greg Snazz, Frank Singleton, Shen Xingzhou, Toshiro Koreshina (Piotr Szreniawski), Dona Mayoora, Juan &Aacute;ngel Italiano, Michael Hurtado, Yoichiro Otani, Mami Kawasaki, Julio Lamilla, Yarita Misako, Kit Nagamura, Jeffrey Johnson, Marcellus Nealy, Anne Murayama, fukudapero, Elena Prendjova, Jes Kalled, Herman Bartelen, Silje Ree, Viktorija Bogdanova, Mitch Alcantara, Chris Mosdell, Ana Jovanovska, Cinzia Farina, Stephen Nelson, Luc Fierens, Federico Federici, Sol&egrave;ne Ballesta and Lin Syouki, Simon Kalajdjiev, Zoria Petkoska K., and Eric Selland.&nbsp;
Essays by Scott Mehl, Jordan A. Y. Smith, and Jim Andrews.&nbsp;
Cover art by Sol&egrave;ne Ballesta and Lin Syoki, design by Victoria Bennett.&nbsp;
Lead editor: Zoria Petkoska K.

ToPoJo Volume 15: Visual//Visionary Poetry

&Ouml;lpest is an experimental writing project I started in 2022, and the name is borrowed from the German word for &ldquo;oil spil.&rdquo; I was inspired by the meditative nature of &nbsp;slathering tar on a metal plate for etching, as well as traditional Japanese and Chinese calligraphy. It&rsquo;s akin freewriting techniques, letting the artist&rsquo;s mind wander through creation. Working on &Ouml;lpest seems to cleanse the mind of ambiguous anxiety, washing the darkness away. In fact, I later found out that art therapists say that using black ink on paper is the most therapeutic of all artistic expressions.
&Ouml;lpest lets me explore the power of the calligraphic black stroke &mdash; not used for the letters but for the background, freeing it from the constrains of predefined structure otherwise dictated by conventional text. &Ouml;lpest is also a script free of meaning, reading and pronunciation. It&rsquo;s asemic writing, a type of visual poetry, solely an aesthetic expression that plays with type, calligraphy, layout and rhythm. The artbook is B5 size and has 60 pages

Experimental calligraphy art book

Ölpest

Tokyo is both the inspiration and the studio for both Simon's glitch art and Zoria's cyber[punk] poetry. They create on the move, oftentimes on the commute, with the excitement, immediacy and restlessness that only Tokyo can stir up, and because the nature of the city also limits time and space for creativity. It's a utopian/dystopian cocktail you can taste in the art and poetry of this book, both tackling themes including futurism, euphoria, belonging, hypercapitalism, alienation, devices and internet addiction.​
&nbsp;
The glitch art looks the way Tokyo sometimes feels. It's shifting, chaotic, exciting and it's unfathomable. While the glitchy language, punctuation liberties and imagined linguistic shifts create a semi-fictional neo-Babel. A DYSTOKYO made of present and future (un)realities.&nbsp;

Cyber[punk] poetry & Glitch art

DYSTOYO

Ölpest - Experimental calligraphy art book

the elusive nature of visual poetry

Guest edited by Suga Keijiro.
Editor in Chief: Jeffrey Johnson
Editorial board: Zoria Petkoska K., Marcellus Nealy, Silje Ree, Barbara Summerhawk, Jordan Smith
Copy editors: Jow Waller, Biankah Bailey, Morgan Schulz
Features poetry by: Asra Ran Bjort. Astra Papacristopolou, Yumi Fuzuki, Emi Nakamura, Yaxkin Melchy Ramos-Yupari, Hiroshi Hasebe, Julia Monk, Aki Nagasaka, Adrian Munoz, Naoko Kasama, Satomi Miura, Yuki Masami, Katsumi Okuno, Joaquin Ivars, Barbara Summerhawk. Morgan X. Schulz, Marcellus Nealy, Jeffrey Johnson, Keijiro Suga, Zoria Petkoska K.
Features art by: Erica Ward, Alejandro Nunez, Daisuke Nakajima (including cover art)

Explores the many relationships between ecologies and poetries.

The Odds of Tokyo Odd Frequencies
Odd, unique, different, strange, weird.&nbsp; Has anyone ever met an impactful artist who was perfectly plain and fit in the mainstream?&nbsp; Not fitting in is a shared experience&nbsp; of the members of this art collective.&nbsp; Perfection is overrated, anyway.&nbsp; We are the odd ones out and&nbsp; we are comfortable in standing out.&nbsp; Facing the odds of moving to live in a city of 30 million people and coming together by mere chance in chaos, perhaps against all odds.&nbsp;
This is the Odds (of Tokyo) art collective. Everyone&rsquo;s here for an odd amount of time,&nbsp; we make the best of it.
 The Odds (of Tokyo) art collective was co-founded by&nbsp; Zoria Petkoska K. and Simon Kalajdjiev 
ZORIA PETKOSKA K. Editor in chief
SIMON KALAJDJIEV Art direction, asemic writing and drawing
ROSS VERIK Drawings, sound design
JEF QUIN Digital collage
Darryl Friemann, @opaquefilm Photos and frequency
HIRO KANO - Apriori.Art Soundwave origami
Zine by the Odds of Tokyo art collective First issue, first printing Tokyo 2025

What are the Odds? 

The Odds of Tokyo Zine: #1 Odd Frequencies

Ölpest 

Tokyo is both the inspiration and the studio for both Simon's glitch art and Zoria's cyber[punk] poetry. They create on the move, oftentimes on the commute, with the excitement, immediacy and restlessness that only Tokyo can stir up, and because the nature of the city also limits time and space for creativity. It's a utopian/dystopian cocktail you can taste in the art and poetry of this book, both tackling themes including futurism, euphoria, belonging, hypercapitalism, alienation, devices and internet addiction.​
The glitch art looks the way Tokyo sometimes feels. It's shifting, chaotic, exciting and it's unfathomable. While the glitchy language, punctuation liberties and imagined linguistic shifts create a semi-fictional neo-Babel. A DYSTOKYO made of present and future (un)realities.&nbsp;

DYSTOKYO

The latest collection from Oregon-Tokyo pond-hopping firebrand, resident poet, co-founder, and Aikido black belt, Barbara Summerhawk.

Wake Me with a Shout

<div id="comp-k56d4q1h" class="UwkEpO _v6ohL ZS_qLz PO9MfV comp-k56d4q1h wixui-rich-text" data-testid="richTextElement">
"Is there something that sets apart queer poets in Japan from other artists of the spoken word? Are we guilty of creating a myopic binary view of the poetic continuum here? We'd like to think that someday, one's gender/sex/sexuality wouldn&rsquo;t matter in our appreciation for a poem, but that time hasn't arrived yet. So we ask ourselves again what is our criteria for selecting poems that would represent the LGBTIQAA perspectives or communities? If we look up at the summer sky at night we see a bright band stretching all the way across from North to South, our Milky Way Galaxy. With the naked eye, a nebulous flow, but with a telescope, we can resolve myriads of individual stars. This volume is our telescope, and we realize we can't adequately represent the whole queer Galaxy, but we can state this is a first scan of said Galaxy."
&ndash;&ndash;from intro, by Barbara&nbsp;Summerhawk
​
</div>
<div id="comp-kgtdsb4r" class="UwkEpO _v6ohL ZS_qLz PO9MfV comp-kgtdsb4r wixui-rich-text" data-testid="richTextElement">
Poetry and Translations by:
Mutsuo Takahashi, Satake Yu, Murayama Kaita, Otake Kokichi, Ishii Tatsuhiko, Ryōko Sekiguchi, Tania Mitra, Tanaka Atsusuke, Mizuta Noriko, Watanabe Mieko, Aizawa Keizō, Eric Selland, Enomoto Saclaco, Ryan Dzelzkalns, Yoshihara Sachiko, Sakisaka Kujira, Jordan A. Y. Smith, Murou-san, Huw Lloyd, Barbara Summerhawk, Cheiron Mcmahill, Hiromi Itō, Jeffrey Angles, Kimberly Hughes, Tanya Barnett, Kawano Megumi, Yamanaka Chise.
Interview: Takahashi Mutsuo X Jeffrey Angles
Reviews of works by Yoko Danno and Ōoka Makoto
Cover art by D Whom, Stefani St Sl*t and Kat Joplin
Featured Editor: TPJ's own Editor Emeritus, Barbara Summerhawk
</div>

ToPoJo Vol.9: Gender / Queer / Here

Forget the history of movements and genres and forms&mdash;this issue explores some of the poetry, poetic techniques, and intersecting, polyglot voices that seem to us to represent the poetic spirit that is animating Tokyo in 2019.&nbsp;​
Poetry and Translations by
Joshua Burns, Stanford Cheung, John Francis Cross, Ryan Dzelzkalns, William Elliot, Naoko Fujimoto, Noriko Gamblin, Derek Gromadzki, Naoko Higashi 東直子, Akane Ichinose, Inagaki Hiloco, Arkaye Kierulf, Taylor Mignon, Sawako Nakayasu, Jasmine Nihmey Vasdi, Katsumasa Nishihara, Gemma Parker, Kōno Saki 神野紗希, Simon Scott, Todd Silverstein, Jordan A.Y. Smith, Tanikawa Shuntaro, Joy Waller, Sharni Wilson, David Walton Wright, and Miki Yuuri
Essays/Reviews&nbsp;by Jordan A. Y. Smith and Todd Silverstein, Laurel Taylor, and Daryl Maude
​Art by Mad Dog Jones

Tokyo Poetry Journal Volume 8

okyo Poetry Journal's Volume13 "Maladies, Calamities &amp; Misfortunes" is a broad poetic response to the pandemic but also includes responses to the killing of George Floyd in the US, the killing of Mahsa Amini in Iran, the invasion of Ukraine, the mob lynching of Madhu in India, as well as other events in the wake of the early 2020 outbreak. Trauma, in certain respects, seems to be the ongoing global &lsquo;new norm&rsquo; and we at ToPoJo wanted to give voice to diverse poetic expressions with our first completely open submissions for poetry. The result, these poems on theme, are eloquent expressions of events that seem to unfold endlessly and on a daily basis. We at ToPoJo believe that we all long for some glimmer of hope on the horizon that presents a turn away from many of the events over recent years. Godspeed.

ToPoJo Vol.13: Maladies, Calamities & Misfortunes

A foray, nay&ndash;&ndash;many forays&ndash;&ndash;into the relations between Japanese and Spanish-language poetry around the world. Editorially spearheaded and masterminded by Jeffrey Johnson. Cryptic title explained in the volume's introduction...
Poetry and translations&nbsp;by&nbsp;Aurelio Asiain, Abul Kalam Azad, Mat&iacute;as Chiappe Ippolito, Juan Antonio Ib&aacute;&ntilde;ez Jim&eacute;nez, Luisa Futoransky, Juan Gelman, Michelle Har Kim, Jeffrey Johnson, Toshiya Kamei, Yannis Livadas,Federico Garc&iacute;a Lorca, Iain Maloney, Fernando Mill&aacute;n, Doris Moromisato, &Aacute;mbar Past, Octavio Paz, Ana Prundaru, Jordan A. Y. Smith, and Jos&eacute; Watanabe.&nbsp;
Essays/interviews by&nbsp;Aurelio Asiain, Mat&iacute;as Chiappe Ippolito,&nbsp;Yaxkin Melchy Ramos, and&nbsp;Jordan A. Y. Smith
Photography&nbsp;by Naemi Ueta
Art&nbsp;by Yasumasa Toshima

ToPoJo Vol.7: Yamato-Sepharad Constellations

Cover design by Samm Bennett.&nbsp;

Conjurers Dream of Voyage

<section class="Jgs2b9">
<div>
<div class="WAZqE7 QfrfFD cell">
<section class="Va_ZoC" data-hook="description-wrapper">
<div class="LvOu6J">
<div class="vaI0UH" data-hook="content-wrapper">
Marcellus Nealy&rsquo;s Capitol Fiction is a luminous and unsettling poetic achievement, blending satire, tragedy, and profound insight into a long-form free verse narrative. Through the perspectives of three distinct voices, he dismantles the simplistic binaries of hero and villain, exposing the moral ambiguities and societal fractures surrounding a horrific terrorist attack.
</div>
</div>
</section>
</div>
</div>
<div class="QfrfFD cell">
<div id="TPAMultiSection_j66ho4xw.product-page-details-4" class="" data-hook="slot-placeholder-TPAMultiSection_j66ho4xw.product-page-details-4"></div>
</div>
</section>

Capitol Fiction

Forget the history of movements and genres and forms&mdash;this issue explores some of the poetry, poetic techniques, and intersecting, polyglot voices that seem to us to represent the poetic spirit that is animating Tokyo in 2019.&nbsp;​
Poetry and Translations by
Joshua Burns, Stanford Cheung, John Francis Cross, Ryan Dzelzkalns, William Elliot, Naoko Fujimoto, Noriko Gamblin, Derek Gromadzki, Naoko Higashi 東直子, Akane Ichinose, Inagaki Hiloco, Arkaye Kierulf, Sawako Nakayasu, Jasmine Nihmey Vasdi, Katsumasa Nishihara, Gemma Parker, Kōno Saki 神野紗希, Simon Scott, Todd Silverstein, Jordan A.Y. Smith, Tanikawa Shuntaro, Joy Waller, Sharni Wilson, David Walton Wright, and Miki Yuuri
Essays/Reviews&nbsp;by Jordan A. Y. Smith and Todd Silverstein, Laurel Taylor, and Daryl Maude
​Art by Mad Dog Jones

Poetry which expertly shares the Beat impulse. Sexy as Kazuko Shiraishi &amp; euphoric as Ken Kesey. Yet these poems are stripped to the bone&mdash;directly expressed. When the author orally reads her work, she subtly pays attention to spaces &amp; so shall you dear reader.
&ldquo;She's rocking the sexual &amp; cultural revolution with impeccable craft, irony, wit, and a woman's voice.&rdquo; &mdash;Leah Ann Sullivan, founder of the Nagoya Writers Group Open Reading series
&ldquo;Something pure and fragile in the midst of grimly damagingly real unyielding circumstances... These poems have an Icarus hubris and an ethereal eroticism about them.&rdquo; &mdash;Duncan Whom, delicate delinquent and queer art cabaret chameleon
&ldquo;Sticky and gritty and succulent language.&rdquo; &mdash;Sorcha Chisholm, singer, musician, and co-creator of Drunk Poets See God

Pause :: Heartbeat

Tokyo Poetry Journal Tokyo Poetry Journal (a.k.a. ToPoJo or TPJ) is a biannual publication of poetry, art, reviews, and 

Tokyo Poetry Journal&nbsp;
<section id="comp-ltjpozre1" tabindex="-1" data-block-level-container="ClassicSection">
<div data-mesh-id="comp-ltjpozre1inlineContent" data-testid="inline-content">
<div data-mesh-id="comp-ltjpozre1inlineContent-gridContainer" data-testid="mesh-container-content">
<div id="comp-j66jm1of" data-testid="richTextElement">
<h6>Tokyo Poetry Journal&nbsp; (a.k.a. ToPoJo&nbsp; or TPJ) is a biannual publication of poetry, art, reviews, and criticism. Bringing poetry to, through, and from the Tokyo world of words and sound since 2015.</h6>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</section>
<section id="comp-ltjpozre2" class="Le88gL comp-ltjpozre2 wixui-section" tabindex="-1" data-block-level-container="ClassicSection">
<div id="bgLayers_comp-ltjpozre2" class="QG9w8P" data-hook="bgLayers" data-motion-part="BG_LAYER comp-ltjpozre2"></div>
</section>

Tokyo Poetry Journal

Tokyo Poetry Journal (a.k.a. ToPoJo or TPJ) is a biannual publication of poetry, art, reviews, and criticism. Bringing poetry to, through, and from the Tokyo world of words and sound since 2015.

ToPoJo Volume 15: Visual//Visionary Poetry

Ölpest

Ölpest

ToPoJo Volume 15: Visual//Visionary Poetry

The Odds of Tokyo Zine: #1 Odd Frequencies

The Odds of Tokyo Zine: #1 Odd Frequencies

The Odds of Tokyo Zine: #1 Odd Frequencies

Ölpest

Ölpest

Ölpest

DYSTOKYO

DYSTOKYO

DYSTOKYO

DYSTOKYO

ToPoJo Vol.13: Maladies, Calamities & Misfortunes

ToPoJo Vol.7: Yamato-Sepharad Constellations

Conjurers Dream of Voyage

ToPoJo Vol.16: EcoPoetry

Capitol Fiction

Pause :: Heartbeat