EROTIC CONTINENT - YUYI CHEN
SHIPPING FEBRUARY 17TH IN CANADA AND EUROPE
In Erotic Continent Yuyi Chen guides us through an America we both do and don’t recognize: a “land of malls”; a “rumor of a country” while all along caught in a state of linguistic vertigo, caught between languages, “sleeping in languages” they both do and do not speak. Chen’s freshly intelligent meditations on the immigrant experience, family, language, and sexuality bring us into their world, a world always on the verge; a world that is fragile, where bed sheets disappear, a world where coming home is never quite what you expect, but is rather “the residue of [a] dream”, impatient but always, in these poems, very sparkly.
Ann Pedone
The lit-up screen, the fractured mall, an ant infestation in an apartment — the worlds Yuyi Chen create collapse and are reconstructed in Erotic Continent, enacting the speculative nature of dislocation. “What’s inside of me is now outside,” Chen writes, “what’s out-side rises above the bodies / of glorious past.” Reading these poems is like moving through a dream, the floor shifting below us, toward a homecoming—internal and external, imagined or real.
Emily Lee Luan
A cultural anthropologist & queer phenomenologist, Sichuan’s Yuyi Chen heatmaps sociopolitical & infrapersonal landscapes with an inclination compass tilted & tinted by the dual powers of desire & survival in city life. Plain language is a surface plot in a diasporic irrealis mood where coordinates are deliberately tender, delightfully obtuse, decadently irreverent, & deliriously entropic. The lyricism recalls the pickled fusion kitsch of Hsia Yu, the more picante, pinyin, & picaro stylings of John Yau — but really, it’s all Yuyi: a nonpareil new voice. No, they can’t make it less spicy. Now read it.
Aristilde Kirby
SHIPPING FEBRUARY 17TH IN CANADA AND EUROPE
In Erotic Continent Yuyi Chen guides us through an America we both do and don’t recognize: a “land of malls”; a “rumor of a country” while all along caught in a state of linguistic vertigo, caught between languages, “sleeping in languages” they both do and do not speak. Chen’s freshly intelligent meditations on the immigrant experience, family, language, and sexuality bring us into their world, a world always on the verge; a world that is fragile, where bed sheets disappear, a world where coming home is never quite what you expect, but is rather “the residue of [a] dream”, impatient but always, in these poems, very sparkly.
Ann Pedone
The lit-up screen, the fractured mall, an ant infestation in an apartment — the worlds Yuyi Chen create collapse and are reconstructed in Erotic Continent, enacting the speculative nature of dislocation. “What’s inside of me is now outside,” Chen writes, “what’s out-side rises above the bodies / of glorious past.” Reading these poems is like moving through a dream, the floor shifting below us, toward a homecoming—internal and external, imagined or real.
Emily Lee Luan
A cultural anthropologist & queer phenomenologist, Sichuan’s Yuyi Chen heatmaps sociopolitical & infrapersonal landscapes with an inclination compass tilted & tinted by the dual powers of desire & survival in city life. Plain language is a surface plot in a diasporic irrealis mood where coordinates are deliberately tender, delightfully obtuse, decadently irreverent, & deliriously entropic. The lyricism recalls the pickled fusion kitsch of Hsia Yu, the more picante, pinyin, & picaro stylings of John Yau — but really, it’s all Yuyi: a nonpareil new voice. No, they can’t make it less spicy. Now read it.
Aristilde Kirby
SHIPPING FEBRUARY 17TH IN CANADA AND EUROPE
In Erotic Continent Yuyi Chen guides us through an America we both do and don’t recognize: a “land of malls”; a “rumor of a country” while all along caught in a state of linguistic vertigo, caught between languages, “sleeping in languages” they both do and do not speak. Chen’s freshly intelligent meditations on the immigrant experience, family, language, and sexuality bring us into their world, a world always on the verge; a world that is fragile, where bed sheets disappear, a world where coming home is never quite what you expect, but is rather “the residue of [a] dream”, impatient but always, in these poems, very sparkly.
Ann Pedone
The lit-up screen, the fractured mall, an ant infestation in an apartment — the worlds Yuyi Chen create collapse and are reconstructed in Erotic Continent, enacting the speculative nature of dislocation. “What’s inside of me is now outside,” Chen writes, “what’s out-side rises above the bodies / of glorious past.” Reading these poems is like moving through a dream, the floor shifting below us, toward a homecoming—internal and external, imagined or real.
Emily Lee Luan
A cultural anthropologist & queer phenomenologist, Sichuan’s Yuyi Chen heatmaps sociopolitical & infrapersonal landscapes with an inclination compass tilted & tinted by the dual powers of desire & survival in city life. Plain language is a surface plot in a diasporic irrealis mood where coordinates are deliberately tender, delightfully obtuse, decadently irreverent, & deliriously entropic. The lyricism recalls the pickled fusion kitsch of Hsia Yu, the more picante, pinyin, & picaro stylings of John Yau — but really, it’s all Yuyi: a nonpareil new voice. No, they can’t make it less spicy. Now read it.
Aristilde Kirby