Cassandra Atherton is an award-winning writer. She was a Visiting Scholar in English at Harvard University in 2016 and a Visiting Fellow in Literature at Sophia University, Tokyo, in 2014. She has published 17 critical and creative books (with three more in progress) and over the last three years has been invited to edit six special editions of leading refereed journals. Cassandra has been a successful recipient of more than 15 national and international research grants and teaching award s including, most recently a VicArts grant and an Australia Council grant. She is the current poetry editor of Westerly magazine.

‘Give Back the Human’

Poetic collaboration and hibakusha poems


Testimonies are viewed as essential for recording the experience of atomic warfare. However, hibakusha Keiko Ogura expresses the need for something more than recording and translating these testimonies. She highlights the need for an understanding of the hibakusha experience through a form of virtual collaboration with hibakusha and their stories. Ogura states that this is best achieved via ‘literature, art and poetry’ (Ogura 2015: n.pag.).

This paper discusses why and how we speak about the atomic bomb and argues that virtual collaboration with hibakusha, by writing poetry based on their experiences and publishing it online, encourages empathy and keeps the experience alive for future generations. This paper uses Brandon Shimoda’s curated issue—entitled ‘Hiroshima/Nagasaki’—of Evening Will Come, a monthly online journal of poetics, as a case study.