“In these poems, Rob Sean Wilson inventories his own coming to consciousness in midcentury America. These are love poems to the world written by an expansive and optimistic lover of the world, one who is attentive to everything from popular song to baseball to geopolitical reconfigurations. They sing. They celebrate. And they unapologetically remind us that what matters is being present for it all: “If I broke your heart world it is because I love you most of all.” —Juliana Spahr, author of this connection of everyone with lungs. “Echoes of one-hand clapping from the other side of time, these are jukebox lullabies for a born-again America ad-libbed by a poet-critic precariously worlding.” --Yunte Huang, author of Charlie Chan "Once more, poet-scholar and transpacific Dharma-bum Rob Sean Wilson hits the beaches running in his relentless pursuit of a Blakean vision of the world reimagined. Like the jukebox it celebrates and replicates, Nikita Moon sizzles with “cross-over hits and unchained melodies” that “spill their tender orients of light” over the postwar decades Rob grew up in, when “the full moon rose red over the Cold War binaries” and heated barriers of East and West—all deftly rendered into Chinese. If poetry is language charged with meaning (as Pound once said), these translations are charged with poetry."-- Steven Bradbury, American-PEN 2020 award for poetry translation. “You got to be in the west of it to see the moon rise. So go west, on the road, perpetually. Leaving the forests of Connecticut and the resounding brass songs, this tireless latter-day dharma bum Rob Sean Wilson has continued his poesis based on one simple anti-Oedipal principle: CONNECT. I CUT. To the west coast and onto the Pacific archipelagoes and a thousand Asias… while humpback whales sing to the hydrogen jukebox, octopuses muse on the art of bricolage-camouflage, and sea turtles circumnavigate, dancing. His elemental animality migrates. Across the Pacific and into chaosmos.” -- Keijiro Suga, author of Strangeography “In the heat of a subtropical island and the passionate depression living in pandemic gloom, after Blade Runner's 2020, we finally contemplate world-buildings and geopolitical issues told by Rob Sean Wilson. The poems in this bilingual gem collect items of beats of places and beatific mindsets, sculptures of wording and worlding. When Nikita Moon Rose is a book for lovers of poetry and anyone who appreciates the blueprints of the mid-20-century reflected in a daring and politically keen sensitivity." --Lucifer Hung, author of Fugues of the Black Sun “Rob Sean Wilson, much like Lou Reed, turned on the radio one day, and couldn’t believe what he heard. Not at all. When the Nikita Moon Rose traces Wilson’s initiation into the pop culture mystery-cult that is postwar American Poetry. The radio is always already Orphic in these pages, but, for Wilson, the truth is greater than any ancient tragedy. His lines pop with wit, pathos, with precise renderings of what Allen Ginsberg called “visionary eyeball particulars.” We see the poet as a child, immersed in the terrors, glories, and banalities of American culture, but we also get to see the man, as a consummate Mental Traveler, reborn in the East, still listening to the world around him and rendering to our delight a whole other kind of music.” -- Joseph Donahue, author of Areas of Elsewhere .