Dream of the Divided Field

“It is five months since we separated,” Yanyi (The Year of Blue Water) writes in this tender second collection. In the aftermath of an abusive relationship (“I am not so different from the long hare/ stretched by her shadow/ her spirit hanging”), the speaker rebuilds himself, reconciling memories, stories, and dreams, each imparting a different kind of truth. “In the hundred rooms,/ I cannot pick one,” he writes, “for each combines into the other/ where I piece-by-piece the shadows.” A doubleness runs through the book as Yanyi shows how an abusive relationship can be destabilizing: “the dream becomes divided./ Your sense of reality. Their sense of reality.” The speaker describes recovering from top surgery with lyric precision: “my pale nipples, the closed eyes of my chest, two sets of eyes now, four eyes, my scars enabling me to be doubly alive.” As he piercingly writes, the self changes and fluctuates, “not backwards or forwards,/ but the past and the present/ overcoming one another.” These subtle, evocative poems offer a reminder that healing comes by embracing multiplicities. (Mar.)