The year of blue water

In his foreword to Yanyi's debut collection, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, distinguished poet Carl Phillips (Wild is the Wind, 2018) writes, To get there is nothing short of revolution: out of fear, into the work of living of loving, too. These incisive prose poems form a dialogue of a mind learning to relate to the self. Yanyi's dexterity of self-discovery is open and honest, and his poems form a frame within which social norms can be realigned. Something as simple, yet powerful, as a given name becomes armor, or something beyond boundaries: Kate calls it a camaraderie; a kinship with other Kates. / She wants to discover who they each are. In this solid collection, Yanyi gathers communities, as Phillips calls them, of both living and dead writers, friends, and artists. Agnes Martin tells me that I need not fear being alone. Robin Coste Lewis talks about a professor who professed that poetry is silence. The interchange in this fine young poet's work is rewarding each step of the way on a path worth taking.--Raúl Niño Copyright 2010 Booklist

"Definitions are not static," writes Yanyi, recipient of the 2018 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, "they are where we begin," and in a series of short, plainspoken prose pieces, he explores the fluid nature of personal identity, the fraught project of discovering and defining one's true self against the corrosive legacies of normative assumptions. While trans and Asian American perspectives are essential to framing Yanyi's inner struggles ("In a dual body, there's no room for both of you"), like Walt Whitman he embraces the spectrum of human experience, following "the impulse to know someone else because otherwise, you don't know yourself." Connectedness is valued and sought after, not only as a fundamental condition for happiness but as the very impetus for individual expression: "For the reasons that I write, I cannot write alone." VERDICT Intimate as a private diary yet aware that "someone is listening on the other end," Yanyi's debut collection offers compressed meditations on the complex relationship between personal and social consciousness, inviting readers to participate in pursuing deep questions whose answers matter less than the shared, ongoing experience of asking.-Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.