Further Adventures in Monochrome

John Yau

John Yau engages art criticism, social theory, and syntactical dexterity to confront the problems of aging, meaning, and identity. Insisting that “true poets and artists know where language ends, which is why they go there,” Yau presses against the limits of language, creating poems that are at once cryptic, playful, and insightful.

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ISBN: 9781556593963

Format: Paperback

Ill-Advised Love Poem

 

Come live with me

We could plant acorns

 

in each other’s mouth

It would be our way

 

of greeting the earth

before it shoves us

 

back into the snow

our interior cavities

 

brimming with

disagreeable substances

 

Come live with me

before winter stops

 

To use the only pillow

the sky ever sleeps on

 

our interior cavities

brimming with snow

 

Come live with me

before spring

 

swallows the air

About the Author

John Yau is the author of thirteen books of poetry, including Radiant Silhouette: New & Selected Work 1974–1988 (1989), Borrowed Love Poems (2002), Ing Grish (2005), Further Adventures in Monochrome (2012), and, most recently, Bijoux in the Dark (2018). A fiction writer and art critic, he has also published monographs and books of criticism, including Wifredo Lam: Catalogue Raisonné of the Painted Work: 1961–1982 (2002), A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns (2008), Joan Mitchell: Trees (2014), Catherine …

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Reviews

“Pressing language to its limit—not to mention image, as he evokes the monochromatic painter Yves Klein—Brooklyn Rail arts editor John Yau draws on art criticism and social theory to write engagingly cutting poetry.” —Library Journal