JUNE 2022 - AudioFile
Listeners looking for a gentle, thought-provoking title to play during a walk or car ride will find this volume of contemplative poetry by Yanyi an excellent choice. Narrated by the American poet in a melodic, dreamy tone, this audiobook is an easy-listening experience that has powerful undercurrents. The poems cover a variety of topics from love to lust and a range of emotions in between, using the idea of home as a metaphor throughout. Yanyi delivers the poems with great feeling that underscores their exploration of the diversity of pleasure and pain in the human experience. Those who might not have tried poetry in audio form might consider starting with this title. M.R. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
04/25/2022
“It is five months since we separated,” Yanyi (The Year of Blue Water) writes in this tender second collection. In the aftermath of an abusive relationship (“I am not so different from the long hare/ stretched by her shadow/ her spirit hanging”), the speaker rebuilds himself, reconciling memories, stories, and dreams, each imparting a different kind of truth. “In the hundred rooms,/ I cannot pick one,” he writes, “for each combines into the other/ where I piece-by-piece the shadows.” A doubleness runs through the book as Yanyi shows how an abusive relationship can be destabilizing: “the dream becomes divided./ Your sense of reality. Their sense of reality.” The speaker describes recovering from top surgery with lyric precision: “my pale nipples, the closed eyes of my chest, two sets of eyes now, four eyes, my scars enabling me to be doubly alive.” As he piercingly writes, the self changes and fluctuates, “not backwards or forwards,/ but the past and the present/ overcoming one another.” These subtle, evocative poems offer a reminder that healing comes by embracing multiplicities. (Mar.)
From the Publisher
Dream of the Divided Field . . . is a broad, existential meditation on the past—specifically, how the past is always present. It’s about life as we’ve lived it, and how that affects the life we’ve yet to live and the people we’ve yet to meet. [Yanyi’s] works are philosophical and lyrical, personal essay and fiction, and fuse binaries and trinaries together as one unit. . . .”—Electric Lit
“In the way that bright lights hurt tired eyes, these poems carve from their raw material an aching tenderness of similarly piercing quality. They occupy the dreamlike space where memories dwell, where hopes and reveries reside as well. Dealing in the duality, and often cyclicality, of death and (re)birth, past and future, visibility and invisibility—and all the beauty and violence that falls in between these two moving points—Yanyi, with his razor-sharp lyricism, sculpts skin-like truths within the marble of the page.”—Literary Hub
“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
“Yanyi charts in his tremendous second book new paths for a poetry both embodied and metaphysical. Taking up one of the oldest aims of poetry, Dream of the Divided Field casts from its first pages a distinctive spell.”—Maureen N. McLane, author of Some Say and This Blue
“The poems are translucent, each informs the next and echoes back—concealment followed by joyous visibility, division followed by integration, and ultimately grief transformed into a luminous reconfiguration of the self.”—Samuel Ace, author of Meet Me There
“In poems that are simultaneously spare and teeming, determined and soft, Yanyi does the patient, transcendent work of building a life larger than its loss.”—TC Tolbert, co-editor of Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics
“The kaleidoscopic vision of the poems creates a disorienting logic that animates and transforms the ordinary world, investigating the limits and multiplicities of a self.”—Saskia Hamilton, editor of The Dolphin Letters, 1970–1979
“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
JUNE 2022 - AudioFile
Listeners looking for a gentle, thought-provoking title to play during a walk or car ride will find this volume of contemplative poetry by Yanyi an excellent choice. Narrated by the American poet in a melodic, dreamy tone, this audiobook is an easy-listening experience that has powerful undercurrents. The poems cover a variety of topics from love to lust and a range of emotions in between, using the idea of home as a metaphor throughout. Yanyi delivers the poems with great feeling that underscores their exploration of the diversity of pleasure and pain in the human experience. Those who might not have tried poetry in audio form might consider starting with this title. M.R. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
