"The revolution is emotional.
It calls me.
I have to sing it out."
One of those lines is from Yanyi's first book,
The Year of Blue Water and the other
from his second Dream of The Divided Field.
There are as many ways to interpret a body of work
as there are bodies, as there are works.
For me, reading Yanyi's books felt
like tracing the textured cyclical routes
of self-conception.
When a life moves into a present life,
a transition marked each time by love lost, sustained, abiding.
Yanyi's poems sing of the harmonies and dissonances
of a full life teeming with a multiplicity of beloveds, queer
friend, immigrant mother, fellow artist, romantic partner,
and the self, inextricable from all of the above.
I quote again from Dream of The Divided Field.
"Where I wept, there was transformation,
and I did both before and after I
flew through the other worlds."
Yanyi is the author of Dream of The Divided Field published
in 2022 by One World Random House
and The Year of Blue Water, winner of the 2018 Yale
Series of Younger Poets Prize selected by Carl Phillips.
Yanyi gives creative writing advice
at his newsletter, The Reading.
It's very good.
Amazing tips.
Recommend.
And Yanyi teaches poetry at the Warren Wilson MFA program.
In 2023, he founded the Asian-American Literary
Archive.
Please join me in giving a warm ecstatic welcome to Yanyi.