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The Yellow House
“The first time I heard Chiwan Choi read, I had no idea what to expect. By the time he was done a few minutes later, I was shaken, almost vibrating with the energy of his voice, his line. The poems in his latest, The Yellow House, show that this energy has only intensified over time. There’s a kind of low-key power to his writing that can be casually devastating—a naked, a cappella warbling that can rise, in an instant, to the ecstatic.”
—Charles Yu, author of How to Live Safely in a Science-Fictional Universe
“I have replaced god / with longing,” writes Chiwan Choi in his latest The Yellow House, a phrase that acts more as earthbound apotheosis of survival than it does as mere thesis. Here, Choi recasts the familial legacy of war and displacement, but also of joy and triumph, into a private spiritual kingdom, where “even after the city is destroyed” he writes, “I will touch you on the surface of everything.” This is poetry as preservation, as an unrelinquished archive of ghosts, but mostly, it arrives, to our luck, as a testament of a self earned and re-earned, like how yellowness, caught in its own dizzying light, turns itself golden. This book is golden.
—Ocean Vuong, author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds
“The Yellow House reads like a story collection but moves like an R&B love song, yearning for things. Uncompromising, masterful, and deeply moving, The Yellow House summons ghosts with whispers and tricks of light. “[H]ere is the world” where we age through memories that appear as images on the ceilings, emoting, and taking our breath away. Taking our faith away. A world where we lose pieces of things—sometimes we lose them whole—including ourselves. Choi’s poetry is a melancholy voice that is calling us back to the place we began or began again, asking us to close our eyes, follow the sound, and remember. A stunning tribute to the lost.”
—Natashia Deón, author of Grace
“Chiwan Choi’s The Yellow House does the remarkable work of a love letter in the form of 'full memories that wrap fingers around ribs.' Whether the exchange is between an adult and a parent, or between lovers or between one’s own faulty remembrances, each wants and needs the other to lift them from a deep rooted sadness. This is that love letter, a true testament of grief and how to remove that grief. And what parents and lovers offer, despite all that one has had to 'file into memory,' is ultimately a testament of love. As readers, we are left in the glow of what The Yellow House has given to us, unafraid of what comes next as we celebrate each page.”
—F. Douglas Brown, author of Zero to Three, winner of 2013 Cave Canem Poetry Prize
—Charles Yu, author of How to Live Safely in a Science-Fictional Universe
“I have replaced god / with longing,” writes Chiwan Choi in his latest The Yellow House, a phrase that acts more as earthbound apotheosis of survival than it does as mere thesis. Here, Choi recasts the familial legacy of war and displacement, but also of joy and triumph, into a private spiritual kingdom, where “even after the city is destroyed” he writes, “I will touch you on the surface of everything.” This is poetry as preservation, as an unrelinquished archive of ghosts, but mostly, it arrives, to our luck, as a testament of a self earned and re-earned, like how yellowness, caught in its own dizzying light, turns itself golden. This book is golden.
—Ocean Vuong, author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds
“The Yellow House reads like a story collection but moves like an R&B love song, yearning for things. Uncompromising, masterful, and deeply moving, The Yellow House summons ghosts with whispers and tricks of light. “[H]ere is the world” where we age through memories that appear as images on the ceilings, emoting, and taking our breath away. Taking our faith away. A world where we lose pieces of things—sometimes we lose them whole—including ourselves. Choi’s poetry is a melancholy voice that is calling us back to the place we began or began again, asking us to close our eyes, follow the sound, and remember. A stunning tribute to the lost.”
—Natashia Deón, author of Grace
“Chiwan Choi’s The Yellow House does the remarkable work of a love letter in the form of 'full memories that wrap fingers around ribs.' Whether the exchange is between an adult and a parent, or between lovers or between one’s own faulty remembrances, each wants and needs the other to lift them from a deep rooted sadness. This is that love letter, a true testament of grief and how to remove that grief. And what parents and lovers offer, despite all that one has had to 'file into memory,' is ultimately a testament of love. As readers, we are left in the glow of what The Yellow House has given to us, unafraid of what comes next as we celebrate each page.”
—F. Douglas Brown, author of Zero to Three, winner of 2013 Cave Canem Poetry Prize
- GenresPoetry
104 pages, Paperback
First published February 22, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
February 5, 2017
A devastatingly beautiful collection. Choi has a knack for finding those quiet spaces between emotions in life, those ineffable moments with our parents as we stand between their two lives-the before us and with us--, and those moments of loss, longing, and love which clash at high speeds and render us awestruck and helpless. Here they are, rendered concretely enough to touch, beautifully enough to move the reader. In a world of hyperbole, this book is a quiet moment of humanity.
March 3, 2017
Incredible collection of poems that weave a story of loss, love, longing, and the lifelong search to find oneself. This should be at the top of everyone's reading list. Chiwan Choi has a rare gift and he's chosen to share it with us.
February 11, 2017
This is an immensely moving work. The rhythm in the clean lines and the sense of loving longing those lines evoke, the sense of displacement twinned with the sensation that the rest of the world is the one that is truly out of place, the elegance in the way it resonates like a gradually quietening bell that maintains its insistence as your ears train to continue to hear, everything. It's hard to know what to say about it because trying to describe it just doesn't seem to convey what it was like to read. I'll simply have to go with that.
March 30, 2017
Haunting and haunted, Chiwan Choi's LA is a half-remembered hardboiled dream. The Yellow House isn't a book of poems so much as a device for becoming poetry while you read it.
August 1, 2018
This book of poetry is wonderful and deeply moving. The themes of home and longingness (especially within the Korean American context) are beautifully written, and this book stays with me wherever I go.
June 11, 2017
"portrait of a family as lines that once existed" !!!!!!
really really exquisite book of poems
really really exquisite book of poems
July 18, 2018
I'm getting to this review much later than I would like, but I'm saddened to say that this book ultimately wasn't incredibly memorable for me. When reading this, I found that each word, each piece of punctuation appeared extremely purposeful, but I found it hard to really connect with it. But then again, why must I connect with it to be able to regard it as something worth reading and valuing? I think that this is a great book of poems...just for somebody who isn't me.
Review cross-listed here!
Review cross-listed here!
June 21, 2024
biased bc i know him but chiwan manages to say with simple words what others have spent decades with thesaures to say
July 23, 2025
holy shit
September 26, 2018
A nice collection of poems. Choi’s emotional depth goes deep. The beginning sections in particular for me were extremely powerful, and the end parts, too. I would read more of Choi’s work to come. A welcome book to read. Recommended.
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April 20, 2017Recommended by Jen Hofer (Antena).
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews