Dream of the Divided Field: Poems

by Yanyi

Overview

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

FINALIST FOR THE NEW ENGLAND BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY • “Written with great tenderness and intimacy, Dream of the Divided Field reveals what we do (and do not) owe to others, and what we owe to ourselves.”—Poets & Writers

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. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593230992
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/01/2022
Pages:	96
Sales rank:	662,591
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Yanyi is a writer and critic. He is the author of The Year of Blue Water, winner of the 2018 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. His work has been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, in Tin House, Granta, and A Public Space, and at the New York Public Library, and he has received fellowships from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and Poets House. Currently, he is poetry editor at Foundry and is giving creative advice at The Reading.

Read an Excerpt

Aubade (The Lake)

Buried dawn broke onto slight leaves. And geese between a cold and hot sky:
a mountain and a sunrise.

It is five months since we separated.

I am not so different from the long hare stretched by her shadow,
her spirit hanging.

What I would give for the dead beat of mud shaped and now eaten in. Coyotes rousing in fast laps of the moon.

Take me to the lake and do no evil.
Lead me by the hair to who I love.



Taking Care

I take off my binder before a massage and dream of top surgery: not having to wait

for the masseur to ask about————, my abnormal desire to be inside this body, once, easily

identified and therefore easy to take care of.
I am not easy to take care of. I should just

take care of myself: ask a doctor to remove the parts that are reprehensible. Like when

they break the nose in order to construct a better one,

I bring a picture to the hairdresser. I bring a picture to the mirror where I cut my skin

with my eyes.
As a man, I’ve learned something of nationhood:

the shape of a brook now straddled by a dam,
or choked by it.



Leaving the House

When I say I’m in love with you,
that means I’m not alone inside of it.

Together we talk to people we love, separately, in one voice.

When my voice fills in love with you.
When I sing on the outside.

Table of Contents

I

In the Museum 3

Aubade (The Lake) 4

Coming Over 5

Taking Care 6

Leaving the House 7

Transitioned 8

Landscape with a Hundred Turns 9

Aubade (In Names) 11

II

Dream in Which I Try to Disappear in Front of My Aunt, or, Interrogation 15

Getting Around (the Dream) 16

Family Tree 17

Listening to Teresa Teng 19

Tenants 20

Flight 21

Blackout 22

III

Antiaubade 25

Reconstruction 26

Catullus 85 27

The Friend 28

The Cliff 37

Eurydice at the Mouth 38

Aubade (Two of Cups) 39

Home for the Holidays 40

Detail 42

Spring of Cups 43

Perennation 44

IV

Affirmation 47

Balenciaga 48

Faith 49

Paradise, Lost 50

Migrants 51

Things We Didn't Know 52

Home for the Holidays 53

Making Double 55

V

Ambulance! Ambulance! 59

$$$ 63

Lengthening, Rites 65

Dream of the Divided Field 66

The End of Another Year 69

Deconstruction 71

I Had a Vision of a Hill 74

Garden Sketch 75

Aubade 76

Translation 77

Once 78

Notes 79

Acknowledgments 81

Editorial Reviews

04/25/2022

“It is five months since we separated,” Yanyi (The Year of Blue Water) writes in this tender second collection. In the aftermath of an abusive relationship (“I am not so different from the long hare/ stretched by her shadow/ her spirit hanging”), the speaker rebuilds himself, reconciling memories, stories, and dreams, each imparting a different kind of truth. “In the hundred rooms,/ I cannot pick one,” he writes, “for each combines into the other/ where I piece-by-piece the shadows.” A doubleness runs through the book as Yanyi shows how an abusive relationship can be destabilizing: “the dream becomes divided./ Your sense of reality. Their sense of reality.” The speaker describes recovering from top surgery with lyric precision: “my pale nipples, the closed eyes of my chest, two sets of eyes now, four eyes, my scars enabling me to be doubly alive.” As he piercingly writes, the self changes and fluctuates, “not backwards or forwards,/ but the past and the present/ overcoming one another.” These subtle, evocative poems offer a reminder that healing comes by embracing multiplicities. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Dream of the Divided Field . . . is a broad, existential meditation on the past—specifically, how the past is always present. It’s about life as we’ve lived it, and how that affects the life we’ve yet to live and the people we’ve yet to meet. [Yanyi’s] works are philosophical and lyrical, personal essay and fiction, and fuse binaries and trinaries together as one unit. . . .”—Electric Lit

“In the way that bright lights hurt tired eyes, these poems carve from their raw material an aching tenderness of similarly piercing quality. They occupy the dreamlike space where memories dwell, where hopes and reveries reside as well. Dealing in the duality, and often cyclicality, of death and (re)birth, past and future, visibility and invisibility—and all the beauty and violence that falls in between these two moving points—Yanyi, with his razor-sharp lyricism, sculpts skin-like truths within the marble of the page.”—Literary Hub

“What does it mean, for each of us to be housed in a body? Yanyi contends with what disappears and what stays, where we inhabit, where we can find safety, and where we can be found. A beautiful book that brings you in, that holds you close.”—Fatimah Asghar, author of If They Come for Us

“Yanyi knows intimately that as with the inconstancy of the lyric thinking and feeling open us to the unknown and to others. To love is to be inside and outside the self, to enter the world and let the world enter you, and how glorious it is to read a book that so bravely takes you everywhere.”—Jennifer Chang, author of Some Say the Lark

“Yanyi charts in his tremendous second book new paths for a poetry both embodied and metaphysical. Taking up one of the oldest aims of poetry, Dream of the Divided Field casts from its first pages a distinctive spell.”—Maureen N. McLane, author of Some Say and This Blue

“The poems are translucent, each informs the next and echoes back—concealment followed by joyous visibility, division followed by integration, and ultimately grief transformed into a luminous reconfiguration of the self.”—Samuel Ace, author of Meet Me There

“In poems that are simultaneously spare and teeming, determined and soft, Yanyi does the patient, transcendent work of building a life larger than its loss.”—TC Tolbert, co-editor of Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics

“The kaleidoscopic vision of the poems creates a disorienting logic that animates and transforms the ordinary world, investigating the limits and multiplicities of a self.”—Saskia Hamilton, editor of The Dolphin Letters, 1970–1979

“In this tender second collection… the speaker rebuilds himself, reconciling memories, stories, and dreams, each imparting a different kind of truth. . . . A doubleness runs through the book as Yanyi shows how an abusive relationship can be destabilizing.”—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

Listeners looking for a gentle, thought-provoking title to play during a walk or car ride will find this volume of contemplative poetry by Yanyi an excellent choice. Narrated by the American poet in a melodic, dreamy tone, this audiobook is an easy-listening experience that has powerful undercurrents. The poems cover a variety of topics from love to lust and a range of emotions in between, using the idea of home as a metaphor throughout. Yanyi delivers the poems with great feeling that underscores their exploration of the diversity of pleasure and pain in the human experience. Those who might not have tried poetry in audio form might consider starting with this title. M.R. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

JUNE 2022 - AudioFile

Listeners looking for a gentle, thought-provoking title to play during a walk or car ride will find this volume of contemplative poetry by Yanyi an excellent choice. Narrated by the American poet in a melodic, dreamy tone, this audiobook is an easy-listening experience that has powerful undercurrents. The poems cover a variety of topics from love to lust and a range of emotions in between, using the idea of home as a metaphor throughout. Yanyi delivers the poems with great feeling that underscores their exploration of the diversity of pleasure and pain in the human experience. Those who might not have tried poetry in audio form might consider starting with this title. M.R. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

JUNE 2022 - AudioFile