New KTCO: Yanyi
We're back! For our first episode of 2022, I'm talking with poet Yanyi. There’s a way in which the end of a serious relationship can shake your entire concept of yourself, and through your grief you have to find yourself again. Yanyi’s latest book of poems, Dream of the Divided Field, braids poems about heartbreak and implied emotional violence with poems about transition and immigration. Each has a similar but distinct sense of a loss of self, a search for self, a yearning for connection and belonging, a sometimes violent disconnection—to a partner, to a place or culture, to oneself and one’s own body. In our conversation, Yanyi and I discussed his book, deconstruction and reconstruction, attachment to nuance, and the relationship between beauty and violence. Then for the second segment, we talked about grief.
Here are some links where you can listen to the episode:
You can also listen to the full episode and find show notes and a transcript at the episode page on the KTCO website.
Toward the end of the first segment, Yanyi and I talked about the ways that Dream of the Divided Field is different from his first book, The Year of Blue Water. If you'd like to hear more about that book, check out our first conversation from back in 2019.
Dream of the Divided Field is available for purchase now and you can find it wherever books are sold. As always, I encourage you to purchase a copy from an independent bookstore, like The Book Catapult here in San Diego.