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Poems
by Yanyi
From an award-winning poet comes a collection on heartbreak and transitions, written with a piercing lyric ferocity.
The poems in Yanyi's latest book suggest that we enter and exit our old selves like homes. We look through the windows and recognize some former aspect of our lives that is both ours and not ours. We long for what we had even as we recognize that we can no longer live there. Yanyi conjures the beloved both within and without us: the beloved we believe we know, the beloved who is never the person we imagine, and the beloved who threatens to erase us even as we stand before them.
How can we carry our homes with us? Informed by Yanyi's experiences of immigration, violent heartbreak, and a bodily transition, Dream of the Divided Field explores the contradictions that accompany shifts from one state of being to another. In tender, serene, and ethereal poems, Dream of the Divided Field examines a body breaking down and a body that rebuilds in limitless and boundary-shifting ways. These are homes in memory—homes of love and isolation, lust and alienation, tenderness and violence, suffering and wonder.
"In this tender second collection… the speaker rebuilds himself, reconciling memories, stories, and dreams, each imparting a different kind of truth... . A doubleness runs through the book as Yanyi shows how an abusive relationship can be destabilizing." —Publishers Weekly
"What does it mean, for each of us to be housed in a body? Yanyi contends with what disappears and what stays, where we inhabit, where we can find safety, and where we can be found. A beautiful book that brings you in, that holds you close." —Fatimah Asghar, author of If They Come for Us
"Yanyi knows intimately that as with the inconstancy of the lyric thinking and feeling open us to the unknown and to others. To love is to be inside and outside the self, to enter the world and let the world enter you, and how glorious it is to read a book that so bravely takes you everywhere." —Jennifer Chang, author of Some Say the Lark
This information about Dream of the Divided Field was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Yanyi is a writer and critic. He is the author of The Year of Blue Water, winner of the 2018 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. His work has been featured on NPR's All Things Considered, in Tin House, Granta, and A Public Space, and at the New York Public Library, and he has received fellowships from the Asian American Writers' Workshop and Poets House. Currently, he is poetry editor at Foundry and is giving creative advice at The Reading.
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