Dream of the Divided Field, Yanyi’s second poetry collection, opens with all the austerity of a sacred epitaph. “The monument lives inside the body / The monument lives outside,” he begins, white space gaping between words. To try and know the self—this “monument” contained within yet pushed beyond a corporeal frame—becomes an act of faith, a leap into and across the unknown: in not only dreams, but the disorienting accumulation of everyday life.
As such, there’s a sense of glimmering unreality to Yanyi’s poems despite how mundane their subjects seem to be. Across the book’s five sections, in slim lyric and prose poems totaling no more than eighty pages, Yanyi captures how frail our relationships—with family and friends, to our bodies and our homes—can be, the small ways they unravel. “Taking Care” begins with the relaxing promise of a massage, but the naked vulnerability it requires turns the poem into a scene of dysmorphic confrontation: “I bring / a picture to the mirror where I cut my skin // with my eyes.” The expectation for the speaker to become more connected to his body becomes subverted as he instead dissociates further from it, his flesh and blood turned into a surgical object, his eyes a scalpel in themselves. “Coming Over” follows a similar inverted logic: A former lover returns to the speaker’s home to pick up possessions left behind, but the relationship severed is between their twinned belongings—“the duplicates in the bags / not wanting to owe me anything”—rather than the speaker and his ex. Objects stand in for their owners, permeable to emotions as the boundaries between people and their possessions dissolve.
Instability gives way to change, and by realizing the fluidity of personhood, Yanyi makes space for the multitudes an individual can hold—what he calls “a hundred rooms” in “Landscape with a Hundred Turns”—and the intimacy of acknowledging those possibilities, a “Morning of More” (“Aubade (In Names)”). As with his debut collection Year of Blue Water, these shifts are not delivered dramatically through metaphorical devices, but with direct, almost conversational language that is just as intense: quiet revolutions. In “Tenants,” the speaker outlines his mother’s stay at a hotel room after flying over to visit, a sign of luxury and privilege if not for his realization that the makeshift nature of the trip feels like yet another form of dispossession for his immigrant family. “My mother’s body doesn’t own anything, not even the motion it is put into,” he declares, but the space Yanyi leaves for parental sympathies does not negate the speaker’s efforts to put himself first. On the next page, “Flight” initially commemorates the past lengths went to for filial piety (“you dove / through ice / to prove”), but turns into a refusal of self-abnegation by the next stanza:
What would I do
for my family?What I ask from disappearance
is that I don’t have to do it again.
The speaker’s resistance to shrink himself for familial satisfaction is simple yet profound, a measured decision that reflects a headstrong sense of self-worth for a trans Asian American poet. In “Listening to Teresa Teng,” he makes clear that this desire to be steadfastly himself is not just an intentional choice, but a compulsory one: “Inheritance, / or what to do with knowledge. // It calls me. I have to sing it out.” “Care, in a country where survival is tied to commerce, can be hijacked by commerce,” Yanyi wrote in The Margins, but his vision of self-care is radical as an end in itself, rather than a means to profit.
In an interview with Sine Theta Magazine, Yanyi described how the guiding ethos of his second poetry collection is a “kind of radical presentness” with his emotions throughout the fluctuations of his life, from interred romances to transitioning. The result is a voice that slips between unflinching defiance and generous intimacy—two different registers fit for the cruelty and beauty of daily life. “Reconstruction,” for example, takes place in the aftermath of surgery as the speaker becomes inured to his new body filled with “muck,” yet he chooses to look closer, not away. “In a spew of yellow pus, / I am crowned with my wound,” he declares; there is no shame in the visceral damage his body has endured (“Chew each root to the / last sinew still mangled”), only pride in his step forward to try and take a new shape. The same resolute intensity is found in the self-mythologizing “Eurydice at the Mouth”; the speaker is cast as the titular Greek character, using her attempted journey out of the Underworld to imagine his own trek to feel at home in his own body (“What would it be to match the depths of hell / with my own light”).
On the opposite side of the emotional spectrum is “The Cliff,” which features a dream conversation with an unnamed “you.” This you tells the speaker that in relationships “there is no such thing as enough,” but this does not deter the speaker so much as emboldens him. The poem ends, “And I have to live with my love. / It is almost more painful than the pain itself.” “Detail” carries the same depth of empathy; what starts off as an innocuous book cleaning transforms, by the next stanza, into wholehearted compassion for a failed relationship: “They fly apart / and grow their understanding.”
Most of the poems that comprise Dream of the Divided Field employ the form of the modern lyric to maneuver deftly between the speaker’s internal thoughts and external observations, granting Yanyi a greater degree of freedom compared to the prose poems of his debut book. The poems can self-interrogate a need for romantic intimacy in one line, admire Christmas-colored candles in the next (“Affirmation”), and also experiment more with the range of voice. Such is the case with “Ambulance! Ambulance!”, which captures what Anthony Veasna So might have called an “exuberant grief.” Stacking 10-line stanzas like Jenga blocks, Yanyi juxtaposes vibrant absurdism with tender mourning, landing somewhere near a Justin Chin poem (another similarity to Chin here is its pop culture-tilt: Yanyi nods toward Robyn, a gay icon of synthpop second only to Carly Rae Jepsen):
Love caught me alive and I caught him too
and smacked his bright cheeks
when he asked for it (saying thank you,
Daddy)
….
Love watched me watch my mother eating
nonchalantly when we ordered too much,
the old memories of someone stern softening
The way Yanyi’s tone careens from kinky and arch to soothing and nostalgic captures the way life unravels restlessly in almost comic proportions—until, that is, the Jenga tower collapses and Love has “died: stabbed in broad daylight / trying to cross the street by you, / my love, who didn’t give a damn.”
As buildings and bodies can be rebuilt and reconstructed, though, Dream of the Divided Field ends not with the rubble of collapse, but the steady pulse of a rebirth in “Once,” the final poem, and one which looks back toward a past with the companionship of “two minds” and the security of “a moment’s / bright precision.” The present, by contrast, is rife with uncertainty, “that hour / without a future or a face.” The poems seek not family nor partner or surroundings for an answer, but inward: “I am the hour. I am the place.” The speaker leaps—across the vastness of the divided field, graced with old bodies, discarded relationships—and lands.
