Dream of the Divided Field

From an award-winning poet comes a collection on heartbreak and transitions, written with a piercing lyric ferocity.

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.

’A book like no other: tender, and eloquent, a singing across borders, across silences.’ — lya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic, National Book Award finalist