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Dream of the Divided Field

Poems

Author Yanyi
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Random House Group | One World
On sale Mar 01, 2022 | 96 Pages | 9780593231005
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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. 
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.
Copyright © 2022 by Yanyi. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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. View titles by Yanyi

About

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. 

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.
Copyright © 2022 by Yanyi. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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. View titles by Yanyi

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