Yanyi: Dream of the Divided Field

One World, paperback

Publication Date: March 1, 2022

Publisher Marketing: From an award-winning poet comes a collection on heartbreak and transitions, written with a lyric and piercing ferocity

Question: How do we carry our homes with us?

Answer: In memory

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, these are poems of love and isolation, lust and alienation, tenderness and violence, suffering and wonder.

In his latest book, Yanyi conjures the beloved whom we believe we know, yet who is never who we imagine, and who threatens to erase us even as we stand before them. We exit our old selves like homes, these poems suggest. We look through the windows and recognize some former aspect of our life that both is ours, and isn’t. We long for what we had even as we recognize that we can no longer live there. 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.