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yanyi
@yanyiii.com
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yanyiii.com
“Like a palimpsest, the light cheery music consumes some of the blade of the words, and indulges a deep longing for a world that comes into being just beyond reach.”

—Eddie Bruce-Jones, from “The Urn” in I WILL NOT GO (2024).
The title of the book is set in large white type on the cover of the book. The cover includes two femme-presenting people wearing bright clothing in red, maroon, and pink with bright yellow flowers. In a way, death, violence and ideas of specific social orders are held, frozen in time, for scrutiny alongside the idea of a good life. The aspirational quality of the music—the dholak, the flute and the tassa-devours the pain, integrating it. Like a palimpsest, the light cheery music consumes some of the blade of the words, and indulges a deep longing for a world that comes into being just beyond reach. In this sense, 'going to Sansur's home' is both physical and unbounded, and 'home' is both a memory and a future, and its location is fixed and ephemeral. It is a place in the heart and mind, and it is right here, under our feet. Part of it dies when the song ends, but some part of it is always right where we are standing.
August 7, 2025 at 3:15 PM
yanyiii.com
“But what is promise if not slaughter and yield?”
—Jimin Seo, from OSSIA (2024).
The book is black with white writing on a wood table. OSSIA I am neither divine or the garden like it. No difference, what's taken away, and what I've given up. Why come here then, the angel's trumpets scant suggestion of music. A new karaoke that says come hither from a dusk-gold rapeseed disco. But what is promise if not slaughter and yield? An animal's call and response of here I am to take off my work and scatter my divinity to the winds, come to find something like home or nothing like it, lives? Would it be any other garden than a farm?
August 6, 2025 at 2:09 PM
yanyiii.com
“[H]ow we choose to interpret life and death is not neutral; interpretation itself is always strategic.”

—Jackie Wang, from THE SUNFLOWER
CAST A SPELL TO SAVE US FROM THE VOID (2021).
how we choose to interpret life and death is not neutral; interpretation itself is always strategic. Some interpretations are more politically and personally enabling than others. I think of this when I write my dreams down in the morning. When I had this dream I thought, Here is the destroyed world, and here-beyond the threshold—is the luminous world. Simone Weil says that the greatest calamity the human race can experience is the destruction of a city. That's where I was: walking through a destroyed city. But ... the luminous tree! Wang’s book on a wood table with a mid century orange stain. The cover contains the photo of a young person in a pink dress with a white pattern of medium complexion and dark shoulder-length hair. They are standing next to a sunflower about their height.
August 5, 2025 at 3:03 PM
yanyiii.com
A song from another time
survived with me.

—Dunya Mikhaïl, from THE IRAQI NIGHTS (2014), translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid.

#sealeychallenge #womenintranslationmonth
SONG FROM ANOTHER TIME A song from another time survived with me. It follows me wherever I go. It rushes after me. I crumple it up, a small piece of paper, and throw it away. But I peel the paper open and smooth it out whenever I remember one of my dead friends. The book on a wood table.
August 2, 2025 at 5:23 AM
yanyiii.com
it does feel nice to write a new newsletter for The Reading! yanyiii.com/the-reading/...
Screenshot from the newsletter. "I think about all the advice I gave on this newsletter in those two short-long years. I miss giving advice, but I also wonder if there was more advice to give, and perhaps I had answered all the questions that I could answer? Because, after all, whatever your question, my answer is a question that only you can answer. Does it honor life? Do you possess your life enough to know how to honor it? What would it take to do that?"
February 14, 2025 at 6:54 PM
yanyiii.com
I contributed 6 poems to the Feb 2025 issue of the Brooklyn Rail. A homecoming & perhaps the most poems I've ever published at once. These both speak from 2020. May the new year, new moon, bring you something all good. Ty to editor Erica Hunt.

brooklynrail.org/2025/02/poet...
In the Middle of This Decade In the middle of this decade, we turned and walked the same direction. I held your hand and didn’t look at the war you thought would kill me. The last good year had a memory of cheeseburgers: I ate them sitting on grass or rock emptying paper of meaning. You walked with me and then, still, we could stop the fighting. I had not yet closed death’s eyes with my lips. Your mouth was not yet familiar. Non Sequitur The purpose of the poet is to say what is not so different. On these days of death I walk around as after all, I’m still alive. For now I roam in a garden of steps, two feet chiming in paratactic melody, and wait for sun to crown the floor of our room. To get to the dream of the end I garden by night. Pea stalks pale blue by moonlight.
January 31, 2025 at 4:52 PM
yanyiii.com
Here I am with @murmurshewrote.bsky.social and our peppermint teas from Friday at Third Place Books Ravenna! It was a pleasure to talk about ghosts, hauntings emotional and actual, and the after-afterlife in her new novel, How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster.
Photo of Muriel Leung and I in front of a large black sign in white letters that says Third Place Books Lake Forest Park, Ravenna, and Seward Park. We are holding up her new novel!
January 26, 2025 at 6:57 PM
yanyiii.com
something about summer in the light and winter in the shade
A patch of grass that is mostly frost in the shade and green in the sun.
January 25, 2025 at 9:50 PM