Forbidden Entries

by John Yau

Fifty-four poems in verse and prose by New York writer John Yau, who has been called “the most important Chinese-American poet of our time” ( MultiCultural Review ).
Yau has distinguished himself by his resistance to conventional discourse. This has taken Yau's work down some “startling thoroughfares,” as critic Edward Foster notes. “His ethnic background marks him as an outsider in America, but he is not interested in merely recording the terms of that exclusion. His work examines ways in which language has long been used, quite often subtly, to oppress and exclude.”
Yau’s conducts us across wastes of “cities . . . fluttering with lost ghouls” to the place “inhibited shadows wait”. As one of his narrators say, “This, we tell ourselves, is the place where we must start.”

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

John Yau is an American poet and critic who lives in New York City. He received his B.A. from Bard College in 1972 and his M.F.A. from Brooklyn College in 1978. He has published over 50 books of poetry, artists' books, fiction, and art criticism.

Reviews

[Frank]

Amazing, fun, and just plain weird poetry by a guy who has a way with words. I read a dozen of them before the adjective ’surrealistic’ alighted in my head. Yau likes the way words sound and feel as much as their meaning and allusions. These poems also remind me of certain works of Francis Martin.