Forbidden Entries

by John Yau

Forbidden Entries brings together fifty-four new 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). But Yau has distinguished himself among multicultural poets by his resistance to what he has called the "oppressive rules" of conventional "the structure of language -- the accepted narratives, their little boxes". Escaping the stifling containment of those structures has taken Yau's work down some "startling thoroughfare", as critic Edward Foster "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 startling thoroughfares conduct us across wastes of "cities... fluttering with lost ghouls" through dawn-inkling "Chrome Snooze Lots" to "shrapnel inlaid verandahs" and "second level nocturnal trellises" where, curtained in mirage, "inhabited shadows wait"... "This, we tell ourselves, is the place where we must start".

Genres: Poetry

199 pages, Hardcover

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.