Yuriya Julia Kumagai's first volume of poetry, "Her Space-Time Continuum," originally written in English and published in 1994, used text layout, language "found" in everyday life, as well as literary theory and language poetry techniques to shape her own idiom. This hybrid approach reflected the speaker's fragmented identity evident in the poems. Though the poems in her just-published companion volume "Double Helix Into Eternity" follow a less experimental mode, with stanzas lined on the left of the page, her new verse gains in lyricism as well as accessibility. Kumagai's poetry is projective in the sense that it is best experienced through her dramatic readings.
Writing poetry initially as course work for an M.A. in Sydney, Australia, she studied poetry recitation and performance under a British theater actress, in order to correct the American English she had learned at elementary school in Long Beach, Calif.
Much performance poetry today relies on striking poses, exaggerated vocalizations, or gimmicks such as dubbing words over music rather than on a grounding of poetry of substance. More expansive than self-indulgent, Kumagai's idiom reaches from quirky in a crosscultural context to grandiose in a crosscosmic context. Double Helix is an allegory of the narrator's search for establishing an identity, problematic because language or signs "have meaning only through difference" (Derrida).