First published in 1981, The Japan and India Journals, 1960-1964 is Joanne Kyger's journal of her four tumultuous years in Japan and India as a young poets in her late twenties. This book chronicles her developing poetic sensibility, emergent Buddhist practice, and what it meant to be a woman trying to write in pre-feminist Beat days. Attentive, witty, and always entertaining, this is poet's prose at its best."A fantastically attentive and personal glimpse into a moment in time when Joanne Kyger was coming into her own as a poet. She lives in Japan, travels to India, sees The Mother in Pondicherry, watches Ginsberg in front of the Dalai Lama, etc. She is always gardening, wherever she goes. And that becomes one of the investments her later poems, written in Bolinas, draw so much of their phenomenal particularity from."-Forrest Gander
