Yanyi is a writer, critic, and the author of The Year of Blue Water. His work has been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, in Tin House, Granta, A Public Space, and at the New York Public Library. Currently, he is a poetry editor at Foundry and giving creative advice at The Reading. The poems in Yanyi’s Dream of the Divided Field (One World) suggest that we enter and exit our old selves like homes. We look through the windows and recognize former aspects of our lives that are both ours and not ours. We long for what we had even as we acknowledge that we can no longer live there. Yanyi conjures the beloved both within and without us: the beloved we believe we know and is never the person we imagine, and the beloved who threatens to erase us even as we stand before them. 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. The tender, serene, and ethereal poems examine a body breaking down and rebuilding in limitless and boundary-shifting ways.
