How can a search for self-knowledge reveal art as a site of community? Yanyi’s arresting and straightforward poems weave experiences of immigration as a Chinese Ameican, of racism, of mental wellness, and of gender from a queer and trans perspective. Between the contrast of high lyric and direct prose poems, Yanyi invites the reader to consider how to speak with multiple identities through trauma, transition, ordinary life.

(From the back cover)

I don’t think I’ve ever read a book quite like this. I think if you’ve ever been in a place where you become so utterly horrified at yourself—or parts of yourself, where it becomes impossible to deal with, this book will let you know you’re not the only one who can feel that way.

            Yanyi tells us that the self at times, feels like a container you’re stuck in. (18)

            There are places I can’t go, like outside my body.

You are never allowed to be anyone else except yourself in your life. And sometimes you are ascribed things that may not feel like yourself. I was reminded of a time when I’d feel like becoming something inanimate, such that I wouldn’t have to feel burdened with all of the troubles that society can have. At the same time, I think a lot about how we perceive the world through our five senses—and the limitations of these senses, and how our lived experience is defined by how we perceive time, how we experience our emotions, and how we make decisions. Perhaps being outside of the body would be a relief. You could be freed by such constraints that we live in currently. Imagine living life as a pet dog or cat with such a heightened sense of smell. Humans could never have that. It’s worth noting that this poem isn’t about anthropomorphism, but I think it certainly highlights the possibilities of going outside of the body, especially when the body may like more of a cage.

Maybe being outside of the body might also help understand the self a little better. One way of being outside of the body is by interacting with other people. Connections anchor the self, as if by illuminating another’s identity can illuminate yours as well. (14)

What I also mean to say is that I recognize the focus. The impulse to know someone else before you reveal yourself. The impulse to know someone else because you have never been asked to reveal yourself. The impulse to know someone else because otherwise, you do not know yourself…

Yanyi suggests that knowing someone else is a lot easier than knowing yourself, but also may help to understand yourself. Knowing the self can seem to be a terrifying thing, because living with such knowledge of yourself is going to be an everlasting thing to reckon with. This may manifest in how we might have trouble with taking responsibility for our actions or feeling guilt about something unexpected. The repetition here highlights that the interaction between the inside and outside isn’t necessarily a conscious decision but more of instinct. I think many of us go through our day-to-day lives without having to think of how we interact with other individuals, unless we are self-aware of ourselves as inherently singular individuals, and a lot of Yanyi’s poems throughout the book seem to be built around this self-awareness.

Yanyi also tells us the self is a stifling and scary place to be. It suggests a similar vein of emotion akin to being suicidal and self-destructive—feeling as if living could come to a stop might suggest its true purpose that only in feeling the extreme can we have a self. (19)

Agnes Martin tells me that I need not fear being alone. To be alone is to face not one fear but multiple fears, and to know them enough to differentiate them. When I am alone in the worst way, I am trapped with myself. Something in me doesn’t want to live. No—something in me doesn’t want to continue. It must not be life, what I’ve been doing. It can’t be life, to not want to live.

This sticks out to me a lot. While the individual is trying to understand themselves, there is an inherent loneliness to knowing the self and the circumstances someone can be stuck in, which is, implied in here, that life is a solitary endeavor. There’s a calm assertion happening here that’s confronting the situation directly, which simultaneously is almost like asking if there is a way to understand life that doesn’t mean death. Is it to stop existing? Or is to find a new way to live?

The last excerpt I’d like to discuss is one about poetry. (41)

Rebecca says, in a lecture for her Intro to Poetry and Poetics class, that poetry is the process of making nothing happen. Nothing’s wrong, nothing’s there, nothing’s the matter. What is nothing? Nothing must now be something. And how can nothing become something—who makes it something?

When you say it is nothing, poetry is where that nothing goes. It is insistently useless.

Wow. As a creative major, it lowkey hurts. But it makes a lot of sense. I have always felt that poems try to untangle things in the theoretical. They expose the things that are already there, but there’s a futility to poems at time because you are working with the introspective. It’s hard to know where poems go. As a practicing poet myself, a lot of poems out there these days don’t necessarily have a definitive point or destination to them. Some of them can describe things and make you feel like you’ve gone through this huge emotional arc, and some of them meander and you might end up in the same place you started. To me Yanyi’s poem, accounting this particular anecdote, reads in dialogue with modernism and its novels, where quite literally nothing happens. There’s a lot of chaos and the characters float around (See The Sound and the Fury, Mrs. Dalloway, The Crying of Lot 49, etc.) This raises the question of why write something that accomplishes nothing? Where is the point in doing something that has no meaning? Or perhaps the product is not the end goal. Is the meaning in the process? I don’t think anyone is supposed to have an answer, but personally the best thing I can say is that people try to attach meanings to things that seemingly have no meaning. A poem that seems to talk about nothing has or had meaning for its creator, and maybe will receive meaning from its audiences.

Overall, I really enjoyed this chapbook. This was my first experience with the prose poem. The starkness of the form, as well as Yanyi’s straightforward language, gives us direct access to the contradictions of being the self, as well as holding space for the characters beyond the scope of the “I.” I would totally recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the particular 21st century experience of individuality.