Dream of the Divided Field
Poems
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From an award-winning poet comes a collection on heartbreak and transitions, written with a piercing lyric ferocity.
FINALIST FOR THE NEW ENGLAND BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY • “Written with great tenderness and intimacy, Dream of the Divided Field reveals what we do (and do not) owe to others, and what we owe to ourselves.”—Poets & Writers
The poems in Yanyi’s latest book suggest that we enter and exit our old selves like homes. We look through the windows and recognize some former aspect of our lives that is both ours and not ours. We long for what we had even as we recognize that we can no longer live there. Yanyi conjures the beloved both within and without us: the beloved we believe we know, the beloved who is never the person we imagine, and the beloved who threatens to erase us even as we stand before them.
How can we carry our homes with us? Informed by Yanyi’s experiences of immigration, violent heartbreak, and a bodily transition, Dream of the Divided Field explores the contradictions that accompany shifts from one state of being to another. In tender, serene, and ethereal poems, Dream of the Divided Field examines a body breaking down and a body that rebuilds in limitless and boundary-shifting ways. These are homes in memory—homes of love and isolation, lust and alienation, tenderness and violence, suffering and wonder.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"It is five months since we separated," Yanyi (The Year of Blue Water) writes in this tender second collection. In the aftermath of an abusive relationship ("I am not so different from the long hare/ stretched by her shadow/ her spirit hanging"), the speaker rebuilds himself, reconciling memories, stories, and dreams, each imparting a different kind of truth. "In the hundred rooms,/ I cannot pick one," he writes, "for each combines into the other/ where I piece-by-piece the shadows." A doubleness runs through the book as Yanyi shows how an abusive relationship can be destabilizing: "the dream becomes divided./ Your sense of reality. Their sense of reality." The speaker describes recovering from top surgery with lyric precision: "my pale nipples, the closed eyes of my chest, two sets of eyes now, four eyes, my scars enabling me to be doubly alive." As he piercingly writes, the self changes and fluctuates, "not backwards or forwards,/ but the past and the present/ overcoming one another." These subtle, evocative poems offer a reminder that healing comes by embracing multiplicities.