Dream of the Divided Field

Reviews

“Dream of the Divided Field . . . is a broad, existential meditation on the past—specifically, how the past is always present. It’s about life as we’ve lived it, and how that affects the life we’ve yet to live and the people we’ve yet to meet. [Yanyi’s] works are philosophical and lyrical, personal essay and fiction, and fuse binaries and trinaries together as one unit. . . .”—Electric Lit

“In the way that bright lights hurt tired eyes, these poems carve from their raw material an aching tenderness of similarly piercing quality. They occupy the dreamlike space where memories dwell, where hopes and reveries reside as well. Dealing in the duality, and often cyclicality, of death and (re)birth, past and future, visibility and invisibility—and all the beauty and violence that falls in between these two moving points—Yanyi, with his razor-sharp lyricism, sculpts skin-like truths within the marble of the page.”—Literary Hub

“What does it mean, for each of us to be housed in a body? Yanyi contends with what disappears and what stays, where we inhabit, where we can find safety, and where we can be found. A beautiful book that brings you in, that holds you close.”—Fatimah Asghar, author of If They Come for Us

“Yanyi knows intimately that as with the inconstancy of the lyric thinking and feeling open us to the unknown and to others. To love is to be inside and outside the self, to enter the world and let the world enter you, and how glorious it is to read a book that so bravely takes you everywhere.”—Jennifer Chang, author of Some Say the Lark

“Yanyi charts in his tremendous second book new paths for a poetry both embodied and metaphysical. Taking up one of the oldest aims of poetry, Dream of the Divided Field casts from its first pages a distinctive spell.”—Maureen N. McLane, author of Some Say and This Blue

“The poems are translucent, each informs the next and echoes back—concealment followed by joyous visibility, division followed by integration, and ultimately grief transformed into a luminous reconfiguration of the self.”—Samuel Ace, author of Meet Me There

“In poems that are simultaneously spare and teeming, determined and soft, Yanyi does the patient, transcendent work of building a life larger than its loss.”—TC Tolbert, co-editor of Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics

“The kaleidoscopic vision of the poems creates a disorienting logic that animates and transforms the ordinary world, investigating the limits and multiplicities of a self.”—Saskia Hamilton, editor of The Dolphin Letters, 1970–1979

“In this tender second collection… the speaker rebuilds himself, reconciling memories, stories, and dreams, each imparting a different kind of truth. . . . A doubleness runs through the book as Yanyi shows how an abusive relationship can be destabilizing.”—Publishers Weekly Expand reviews