Poetry
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Dream of the Divided Field: Poems
From an award-winning poet comes a collection on heartbreak and transitions, written with a piercing lyric ferocity.
"A book like no other: tender, and eloquent, a singing across borders, across silences."-Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic, National Book Award finalist
The poems in Yanyi's latest book suggest that we enter and exit our old selves like homes. We look through the windows and recognize some former aspect of our lives that is both ours and not ours. We long for what we had even as we recognize that we can no longer live there. Yanyi conjures the beloved both within and without us: the beloved we believe we know, the beloved who is never the person we imagine, and the beloved who threatens to erase us even as we stand before them.
How can we carry our homes with us? Informed by Yanyi's experiences of immigration, violent heartbreak, and a bodily transition, Dream of the Divided Field explores the contradictions that accompany shifts from one state of being to another. In tender, serene, and ethereal poems, Dream of the Divided Field examines a body breaking down and a body that rebuilds in limitless and boundary-shifting ways. These are homes in memory-homes of love and isolation, lust and alienation, tenderness and violence, suffering and wonder.
"A book like no other: tender, and eloquent, a singing across borders, across silences."-Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic, National Book Award finalist
The poems in Yanyi's latest book suggest that we enter and exit our old selves like homes. We look through the windows and recognize some former aspect of our lives that is both ours and not ours. We long for what we had even as we recognize that we can no longer live there. Yanyi conjures the beloved both within and without us: the beloved we believe we know, the beloved who is never the person we imagine, and the beloved who threatens to erase us even as we stand before them.
How can we carry our homes with us? Informed by Yanyi's experiences of immigration, violent heartbreak, and a bodily transition, Dream of the Divided Field explores the contradictions that accompany shifts from one state of being to another. In tender, serene, and ethereal poems, Dream of the Divided Field examines a body breaking down and a body that rebuilds in limitless and boundary-shifting ways. These are homes in memory-homes of love and isolation, lust and alienation, tenderness and violence, suffering and wonder.
Editorial Reviews
"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
"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
Short Excerpt Teaser
Aubade (The Lake)
Buried dawn broke
onto slight leaves. And geese
between a cold and hot sky:
a mountain and a sunrise.
It is five months since we separated.
I am not so different from the long hare
stretched by her shadow,
her spirit hanging.
What I would give for the dead
beat of mud shaped and now
eaten in. Coyotes rousing
in fast laps of the moon.
Take me to the lake and do no evil.
Lead me by the hair to who I love.
Taking Care
I take off my binder before a massage
and dream of top surgery: not having to wait
for the masseur to ask about----, my abnormal
desire to be inside this body, once, easily
identified and therefore easy to take care of.
I am not easy to take care of. I should just
take care of myself: ask a doctor to remove
the parts that are reprehensible. Like when
they break the nose in order
to construct a better one,
I bring a picture to the hairdresser. I bring
a picture to the mirror where I cut my skin
with my eyes.
As a man, I've learned something of nationhood:
the shape of a brook now straddled by a dam,
or choked by it.
Leaving the House
When I say I'm in love with you,
that means I'm not alone inside of it.
Together we talk to people
we love, separately, in one voice.
When my voice fills in love with you.
When I sing on the outside.
Buried dawn broke
onto slight leaves. And geese
between a cold and hot sky:
a mountain and a sunrise.
It is five months since we separated.
I am not so different from the long hare
stretched by her shadow,
her spirit hanging.
What I would give for the dead
beat of mud shaped and now
eaten in. Coyotes rousing
in fast laps of the moon.
Take me to the lake and do no evil.
Lead me by the hair to who I love.
Taking Care
I take off my binder before a massage
and dream of top surgery: not having to wait
for the masseur to ask about----, my abnormal
desire to be inside this body, once, easily
identified and therefore easy to take care of.
I am not easy to take care of. I should just
take care of myself: ask a doctor to remove
the parts that are reprehensible. Like when
they break the nose in order
to construct a better one,
I bring a picture to the hairdresser. I bring
a picture to the mirror where I cut my skin
with my eyes.
As a man, I've learned something of nationhood:
the shape of a brook now straddled by a dam,
or choked by it.
Leaving the House
When I say I'm in love with you,
that means I'm not alone inside of it.
Together we talk to people
we love, separately, in one voice.
When my voice fills in love with you.
When I sing on the outside.
