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.

(Conversation recorded February 28, 2022.)

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Show Notes:

• Yanyi
• Yanyi - Dream of the Divided Field
• Yanyi - The Year of Blue Water
• Yanyi - The Reading
• Samuel Ace
• TC Tolbert
• Parul Sehgal - “The Case Against the Trauma Plot”
• Carmen Maria Machado - In the Dream House
• Keep the Channel Open - Episode 33: José Olivarez
• Jane Hirshfield - Nine Gates

Transcript Episode Credits

• Editing/Mixing: Mike Sakasegawa
• Music: Podington Bear
• Transcription: Shea Aguinaldo