scrow1022's review
5.0
Exquisite. Such wonderful questions posed here, what beautiful statements of faith. Will be returning to this to meditate on.
chrism1's review
4.0
The poems are prose poems, and they discuss the author's journey from a woman to a man. Some humour and beautiful images, but I was not emotionally invested because some of the poems read as fragments rather than specific poems.
vnha_r's review
dark
emotional
reflective
fast-paced
2.75
Some beautiful words, but wanted something more substantive/less meditative.
hilaryreadsbooks's review
5.0
Poems as letters, addressed to the dead and living. Yanyi’s THE YEAR OF BLUE WATER speaks to immigration, queerness, mental illness, and writing practice. Yanyi’s lyricism is in his succinctness and spareness, but there are some truly beautiful imagery—crying as a glass overfilling, silence as a space for and against meaning, church bells like “two hands dipped in each other.”
Some of these poems are addressed to other artists. Here, writing and reading become more than words on a page; they become portals of speaking and listening, a mitigation of loneliness. Here, I am reminded again of lineages within art—that writing as practice is never a solitary act; rather, the lives and work of those before and around and after you bleed into your own art, your own life. In this way, writing and reading also become acts of generosity: from those listening, from those speaking and being heard, even if it is ages into the future.