Name: The Year of Blue Water
ISBN: 9780300244830

Yanyi (poet)

The Year of Blue Water

nita

so beautiful/tender, like a cross pollinated flower w/ muse, so sparse so as to make it more of itself (a space/negative composition masterclass!)

Aadhiya

Yanyi

Winner of the 2018 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize 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. These poems constitute an artifact of a groundbreaking and original author whose work reflects a long journey self‑guided through tarot, therapy, and the arts. Foregrounding the power of friendship, Yanyi’s poems converse with friends as much as with artists both living and dead, from Agnes Martin to Maggie Nelson to Robin Coste Lewis. This instructive collection gives voice to the multifaceted humanity within all of us and inspires attention, clarity, and hope through art-making and community.

Year of Blue Water

l🌀

so delicate & filled with tremendous revelation at the same time. this book feels so…life-giving

i went into this blind !! i was not prepared for how this was going to grab me by the shoulders and look into my eyes the way it did !!! so many painfully honest writings on the author's experience with being trans, his queerness, and growing up poor. so much love and heartache :< i felt so vulnerable and gentle by the end. i devoured this within an hour or so but i just had to sit with it for so long. i want to scream.

syre

雪 xue

jiaqi kang

"She walked because she wanted to walk. I walked because I liked the companionship of going nowhere together, the endlessness of being with another person." (36) 

thank u lis for this gift... friendship, loneliness, identity, being, how to be, how to stay alive. the whole brief time i was reading this i was somehow filled with trepidation, like i really wanted it to end but was also terrified of it?

this collection read like a river, that when I reached the end of it, I asked aloud, "what? that's it?" the source of one of my favorite quotes. it resonated.

The Year of Blue Water

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