The Year of Blue Water

By Yanyi

How can a search for self‑knowledge reveal art as a site of community? Yanyi’s arresting and straightforward poems weave experiences of immigration as a Chinese American, of racism, of mental wellness, and of gender from a queer and trans perspective. Between the contrast of high lyric and direct prose poems, Yanyi invites the reader to consider how to speak with multiple identities through trauma, transition, and ordinary life.
-- from Amazon.
A good life is: other people (and therapy)

Yanyi’s poems read like notes app journal entries: short, candid, brimming with in-the-moment observations and rich self-insight. He unpacks nuanced relationships with trauma, transition and ordinary life, in poems which celebrate friendship and communion.

- Nathaniel, NL