Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Tell it Slant

Tell it Slant

Yau, John

Paperback

General Poetry

ISBN10: 1632431254
ISBN13: 9781632431257
Publisher: Omnidawn
Published: Oct 6 2023
Pages: 73
Weight: 0.25
Height: 0.30 Width: 5.90 Depth: 8.90
Language: English
Poems that consider doubleness and truth-telling through the voice of an Asian American poet, while referencing a range of writers and pop culture figures.

Emily Dickinson begins one of her poems with the oft-quoted line, Tell all the truth but tell it slant. For Asian Americans, the word slant can be heard and read two ways, as both a racializing and an obscuring term. It is this sense of doubleness-culminating in the instability of language and an untrustworthy narrator-that shapes, informs, and inflects the poems in John Yau's new collection, all of which focus on the questions of who is speaking and who is being spoken for and to. Made up of eight sections, each exploring the idea of address-as place, as person, as memory, and as event -Tell It Slant does as Dickinson commands, but with a further twist. Yau summons spirits who help the author tell all the truth, among whom are reimagined traces of poets, movie stars, and science fiction writers, including Charles Baudelaire, Thomas de Quincey, Philip K. Dick, Li Shangyin, and Elsa Lanchester.

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