Raúl Niño
Yanyi’s dexterity of self-discovery is open and honest, and his poems form a frame within which social norms can be realigned. . . . The interchange in this fine young poet’s work is rewarding each step of the way on a path worth taking.
Honors
Finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Poetry
About the Book
A debut collection that records time, self-making, and difference in language that is direct, crystalline, and emotionally searching.
As its title implies, The Year of Blue Water reads as a record of time, a kind of daybook of observations in sentences so crystalline, spare, direct, and yet offhand, that it can be easy to miss, at first, the book’s complexity.
These poems offer the difficult gifts of difference through a clear and moving language, as an aperture widening insight into how we belong (or not), how we know or un-know, are seen or self-erase, all choices at the heart of becoming, naming one's self.
Praise
Carl Phillips
As its title implies, The Year of Blue Water reads as a record of time, a kind of daybook of observations in sentences so crystalline, spare, direct, and yet offhand, that it can be easy to miss, at first, the book’s complexity.
Erica Hunt
These poems offer the difficult gifts of difference through a clear and moving language, as an aperture widening insight into how we belong (or not), how we know or un-know, are seen or self-erase, all choices at the heart of becoming, naming one's self.
Ross Gay
I love the rigorous self-intimacy that allows Yanyi such wisdoms as: 'If there’s a thing I want to teach me, it’s how I live my light.' This book carries, and shares, that light.
Terrance Hayes
It’s almost enough to praise the richness of this amazing book’s references to culture. The Year of Blue Water is powered by a breathtaking range of subjects and subjectivities, but the simultaneously relaxed and radical pitch of the diction here is also a marvel. Each poem is as unpredictable and intimate as a conversation with no boundaries to its thinking and feeling. This book is laboratory of experience and experiment. It’s a debut of singular invention.
Press
Inquiries
For press copies, interviews, or classroom inquiries, please contact Caitlin Gallagher at Yale University Press (caitlin [dot] gallagher [at] yale [dot] edu). For anything else, use the contact page.