Yanyi
“I hope to live in a world where I only represent myself. Unfortunately, relations of power are not only foisted upon me, but all of us. It is up to all of us to respond and relate more imaginatively.”
Yanyi
(c) Yanyi
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“Here is a book of the body, a book like no other: tender, and eloquent, a singing across borders, across silences. What does it mean? It means that Dream of the Divided Field is a kind of a book that you can’t just talk about, you simply got to quote whole poems. For instance, this one: “I woke up with so much love for you / It doesn’t matter where I am // I am making eggs // The sun is warming my just-shaved head / like your hand when sometimes / it rests there.” This is because Yanyi is a terrific poet, one who’s written for us a book to read when we wake in the middle of the night and need a voice that is filled with longing, and truth, delight of being, despite all the painful odds.”
“As its title implies, The Year of Blue Water reads as a record of time, a kind of daybook of observations in sentences so crystalline, spare, direct, and yet offhand, that it can be easy to miss, at first, the book’s complexity.”
“Weaves together descriptions of experiences of immigration as a Chinese-American and of racism, mental wellness, and gender from a queer and trans perspective.”
“This sublime new volume from Foundry Journal editor Yanyi uses spare, artful language crafted into small proselike paragraphs to traverse the land of rootlessness and community — the rootlessness of immigration, being queer, and being trans; the community of writing and art.”
Yanyi is the author of Dream of the Divided Field (One World Random House, 2022) and The Year of Blue Water (Yale University Press, 2019), winner of the 2018 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize and a LAMBDA Literary Award finalist. His work has been featured in or at NPR’s All Things Considered, the New York Public Library, Tin House, Granta, A Public Space, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Poets House, and the Millay Colony for the Arts.
In an interview with BOMB Magazine, Yanyi was asked about his creative process: “Why is it that we think artistic processes are about one person in a room alone? That’s a really isolating experience and not my experience of literature. I would not be able to continue on as an artist if I didn’t have people who loved me and cared about me, who were part of my artistic process.”
This dedication to community has led Yanyi to write a monthly creative advice column called The Reading, where he answers letter-writers with questions from ‘How Do I Write About My Identity Authentically?’ to ‘Am I Too Old to Emerge?’
Yanyi’s critical work has focused on power and editorial practices in poetry. In a 2018 essay on tokenization in The Margins, he asks: “What would it be to stop playing our parts in the theatres of those who won’t value us readily?” His more recent work has examined how modern fascist movements and historically uncertain survival haunt the stakes of interpreting contemporary poetry.
Yanyi holds an MFA in Poetry from New York University and formerly served as curatorial assistant at The Poetry Project and poetry editor at Foundry. He lives in Vermont.
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Dream of the Divided Field
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The Year of Blue Water
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