Pai, Shin Yu: No Neutral

Empty Bowl, paperback

Publication Date: September 12, 2023

Publisher Marketing: In a collection that is deeply occupied with the notion of voice and who gets to have it, Shin Yu Pai's NO NEUTRAL reaches toward a more authentic and natural voice to represent the poet's perspective in all its range and concerns. Written during the pandemic, NO NEUTRAL is Shin Yu Pai's latest book of poems. In this new collection, Pai dives deeply into explorations of place and their histories.

From Port Townsend and the Inland Empire of Southern California, to the deserts surrounding Palm Springs, the poet contemplates place and time and one's identity within these shifting spaces. Pai weaves poems about social unrest, conflict, solidarities, friendships, and the mindset of an activist throughout the book, as well as the perspective of her experiences as a mother and daughter. She continues her lifelong engagement with the visual arts with poems inspired by the site-specific works of Rana Begum, Andy Goldsworthy, Maya Lin, Richard Turner, and Tyre Nichols, while also turning her attention to the art of Degenerate Art Ensemble. In a collection that is deeply occupied with the notion of voice and who gets to have it, NO NEUTRAL reaches toward a more authentic and natural voice to represent the poet's perspective in all of its expansive range and concerns.

"Shin Yu Pai's NO NEUTRAL sings through the quiet tangle of solidarity and memory-work. Exploring interrelated griefscapes of military monuments in the Pacific Northwest, widespread and continuous anti-Asian violence, and our shared vulnerabilities during the coronavirus pandemic, these poems--a sonic and imagistic counter-architecture--make possible new forms of mourning and witness. These narratives and lyrics of the everyday, at times necessarily biting and sardonic, self-reflexive, meditative, and deeply researched, pursue the wild motherly interior as an Asian American feminist politics and poetics of refusal, resistance, and reckoning."
--Jason Magabo Perez, San Diego Poet Laureate

"Whether confronting anti-Asian violence, the almost forgotten histories of minoritized peoples, or the delicate fall of incense ash, Shin Yu Pai listens and hears the world around us and transforms those moments into shimmering poems that stay with us long after first reading."
--Dennis Maloney, poet and publisher of White Pine Press Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies.