One Thousand Origami Paper Cranes Fly Away
Author: Martin Willitts Jr.
ISBN: 9798989660735
Publisher: River Paw Press
Page Count: 40
Language: English
One Thousand Origami Paper Cranes Fly Away, a 2025 Silent River Poetry Prize-winning chapbook by Martin Willitts Jr., is a moving poetic tribute to the victims and survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Drawing on historical memory as well as lived experience, the collection bears witness to the enduring human cost of war and its aftermath.
Now Available For Pre-Order at a Special Price
In ‘One Thousand Origami Paper Cranes Fly Away’ Martin Willitts, Jr. has achieved the seemingly impossible through his ability to convey, via poetry, the soft meditations and recollections of Hiroshima through Japanese eyes. These poems of grief, nature, and recollection construct the past and present in a seamless way, against intensely lyric contemplations of silence, burning, suddenness, and preservation. In ‘One Thousand Origami Paper Cranes Fly Away’ the poet has managed to tune into the most relevant element of memorialization, with the colors and sounds of Japan, and does so with a revered respect that echoes through the beauty of the language he selects.
— Candice Louisa Daquin, author ofThe Cruelty and Tainted by the Same Counterfeit
In One Thousand Origami Paper Cranes Fly Away Searching for Peace, Martin Willitts, Jr. gives us in bright flashes and quiet meditations the bombing of Hiroshima from the Japanese perspective. With poems of love and grief, cranes and Koi, ghosts and memory, Willitts shapes “a Zen Garden of well-placed stones. …allowing time to slipstream” into patterns that construct lives past and present. In these lush, lyrical contemplations, he “imagine[s] / silence /burning,” reminding us that “[w]e all live within moments of potential suddenness.” Willitts’ poems both incinerate and preserve, “carrying a prayer to where all prayers merge / and become oneness.”
— Marjorie Maddox, author of Hover Here
The poems in One Thousand Origami Paper Cranes Fly Away Searching for Peace are arranged as carefully as the rocks in the Zen gardens that adorn the collection throughout, each poem placed in just the right spot to lead us through the incredible depths of grief and longing in them. Each poem is a stone depicting things like love, loss, pain, memory, language. Ultimately, it is the vulnerability embodied in these poems that helps us to endure that “you can’t always repair what’s broken.”
— Michael T. Young, author of Mountain Climbing a River
One Thousand Origami Paper Cranes Fly Away – Price: $17.99
Availability & Special Offer: For a limited time, River Paw Press is offering One Thousand Origami Paper Cranes Fly Away at a special price of $16.00, with free shipping within the United States.
Regular price thereafter: $17.99 plus a flat $5.00 shipping and handling fee.
• U.S. Orders: Shipped directly by River Paw Press
• International Orders: To avoid high international shipping costs, we recommend purchasing the book through Amazon or other major online retailers in your country. You may also contact us by email for international shipping and handling costs.
This is a timely and resonant poetry chapbook—one you will not want to miss.
