Authored Books
Bitter Angels
El León Literary Arts / Manoa Books, 2021
ISBN 978-0-9799504-3-8
6" x 9" 32 pp.
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Brilliant, shimmering with beauty and sorrow, Pat Matsueda’s Bitter Angels speaks to us from the intersection of the incarnate world and the transcendent. Suffering, both private and historical, weaves its legacy of pain, transformed here into the luminous, the healing, through the alchemy of Matsueda’s exceptional, radiant poetry.—Lillian Howan, author of The Charm Buyers
Bedeviled: A Novella
El León Literary Arts / Manoa Books, 2016
ISBN 978-0-9799504-0-7
6" x 9" 128 pp.
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At war with the better angels of his nature, Ted Koga takes refuge in a realm of fantasy and sensuality. He comes to prefer it to his daily life, then discovers that it is as unsafe as it is seductive, as likely to expose his secrets as keep them. While the online identity he fashions helps him to survive, it also threatens the fragile realities of family, love, and faith in himself.
Bedeviled is a virtuous tale about ordinary sin and redemption on one level, but also a tale of societal madness and a tale of escape into an alternate possible self. Ted Koga, the main character, is entirely believable. He seems at first to be on the royal road to paranoia and ruin but is extracted by the fates, as it were, for a great ending.
—Gary Mawyer, author of Dark and Other Stories
Bedevilled is a lyrically written exploration of a man who, for a variety of social, sexual and personal reasons, violently rejects all that he holds dear and begins to live a hallucinatory life of addiction. The novella’s intention is not to offer yet another example of a man at the edge of desperation, but to search for a way back to a compassionate order of things where the body has its own integrity, sex its own loving and healing power. Here, each person can stand "face to face" with his or her own self and say: there is nothing to fear if you try, whenever possible, to live according to the integrity of your own reason, rejection of all moral and spiritual abuse, and the unhurt acceptance of even those who may have wronged you.
—Alok Bhalla, Editor, Critic, Translator
Stray
El León Literary Arts / Manoa Books, 2006
ISBN 978-0-9762983-8-0
6" x 10" 80 pp.
As a collection, the poems interweave tangible images; human failing; abstract ideas about literature, poetry, and healing; and love. A powerful and moving voice—soft and at the same time very strong. I would call it not acerbic, but uncompromising. These poems tell the truth—the beauty and the pain of life—and hold out hope that steadfastness and clear sight will heal us.—Phyllis Young, author of Sea Home
Evocative, sensuous, plangent, the poems in Pat Matsueda's long-awaited book are charged with the phenomenal world. Line by line, phrase by phrase, these poems won't go away: when you close your eyes, they are there; when you open your eyes, they are still there.—Arthur Sze, author of The Redshifting Web: Poems 1978–1998
It's a remarkable piece of work, confronting realities very few of us have the courage to address, in language that draws us deeply into what is painful, ambivalent, and liberating.—Barry Lopez, author of Arctic Dreams
It is an immensely gratifying book and I will treasure it as one of the best in my collection.—Gene Frumkin, author of Freud by Other Means
Such wise, tender, and beautiful poems!—Molly Giles, author of Iron Shoes
I'm reading STRAY, one poem a day, and finding my first good opinion more than justified—it's the best book to come my way in a long time.—Michael Hannon, author of Trusting Oblivion
The Fish Catcher
Petronium Press, 1985
ISBN 978-0-9321360-8-4
5.5" x 8.5" 32 pp.
Designed by Frank Stewart, the cover of The Fish Catcher features a beautiful photograph taken by Hawai‘i photographer Franco Salmoiraghi. The chapbook begins with two epigraphs:
Once I came across two ideographs for the word "love." The first contained the root words "heart" and "hand" and "action"—love as hands and heart in action together. The other ideograph, for "passionate love," was formed of "heart," "to tell," and "a long thread."—Joy Kogawa
I ask to be melted. You can only ask of the metals that they be tender to the fire that melts them. To nought else can they be tender.—Thoreau
What binds all these tension-filled yet quiet poems together is the kind of economy that a chapbook should encourage.…In The Paper and her other endeavors, Pat Matsueda has consistently presented Hawaii's writing to best advantage. It's a pleasure to see her own fine poetry published with the same care in The Fish Catcher.—Craig Howes, coauthor of The Value of Hawai‘i
Each poem cuts through to the deep center and then begins to resonate and echo there, like a pebble thrown right into the pool of my life.—James D. Houston, author of Continental Drift
Edited Books
Ms. Aligned 3: Women Writing About Men
El León Literary Arts / Manoa Books, 2020
Edited by Rebecca Thomas
ISBN 978-0-9799504-2-1
6" x 9" 122 pp.
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Edited by Rebecca Thomas, a writer and faculty member at West Virginia University, Ms. Aligned 3 features women’s writing focused on the male childhood: stories about boys on the difficult journey to adulthood; poems about being in love, being separated from family, or behaving in harmful, toxic ways; essays that describe the push-pull in male-female relationships and how we start influencing each other from a young age. The book has eighteen writers and two painters and a foreword by Shawna Yang Ryan.
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Ms. Aligned 2: Women Writing About Men
El León Literary Arts, 2017
Coedited by Connie Pan
ISBN 978-0-9891277-5-2
6" x 9" 126 pp.
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From “Because We Need Evidence, Send His Emails Somewhere You Don’t Have to See Them” by Connie Pan.
Ms. Aligned 2 has sixteen contributors, including cover artist Súa Agapé, and has a foreword by Jill McCabe Johnson, a preface by editors Connie Pan and Rebecca Thomas, and an introduction by Kristiana Kahakauwila.
Ms. Aligned 2 offers a stellar showcase. From an impassioned premise surfaces such a platter of beautiful surprises. The voices are distinct and diverse, the narratives all admirably rendered. The reader comes away with a soft wisdom. Of what it means to be relational. Of what it means to be complex, gendered beings navigating our heavy, exacting world. Fascinating and extraordinary!—Desmond Kon Zhicheng Mingdé
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Ms. Aligned: Women Writing About Men
Aligned Press, 2016
Coedited by Sheyene Foster Heller
ISBN 978-1-3299707-7-9
8.5" x 11" 133 pp. (PDF)
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Inspired by the response to "Male Creations and Their Female Creators"—a panel I organized for the 2014 conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs—I asked Sheyene Foster Heller if she'd like to help me gather more work written by women about men. The culmination of a two-year project, Ms. Aligned has twenty women writers and visual artists. We see men struggling with tenderness and need; reflecting on their identities and their futures; engaged in foreign and civil wars that have taken over their personal lives; and trapped between survival and transcendence. Included in the book is commentary in which the women describe their motivations and the male influences on their work. The twenty contributors range from recipients of local and national awards to a college senior; introduction by Sukrita Paul Kumar and afterword by Kristiana Kahakauwila.
Magazines
Vice-Versa
University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa ezine
Published annually
Vice-Versa is an ezine I founded in the mid-2000s and is published with the assistance of the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.
The latest issue is Obsession, published in summer 2023 and guest-edited by Gary Mawyer and Gregory Dobrasz. Contents include
introduction by Gary Mawyer
fiction by Lillian Howan, Angela Nishimoto, and Gary Mawyer, Edward Mawyer, and Daniel Mawyer
nonfiction by Gregory Dobrasz, Quincy Howard, and Donald Mawyer
poetry by Debra Hiers
photography by Alan Mawyer.
Photograph by Jaredd Craig from unsplash.com (digitally edited for this site)
Auteur Limits was created in the ninth month of the twenty-second year of the twenty-first century. Its purpose is to give authors and publishers a place to talk about the books they work on. These can be published, on the verge of being published, or in the process of being written.