Books by John Yau and Complete Book Reviews

John Yau, Author . Penguin $17 (133p) ISBN 978-0-14-200051-9
Landing somewhere between the surreal-noir aesthetics of David Lynch's Mulholland Drive; a kinder, gentler version of J.K. Huysman's Paris decadence; and the aggregated syllables of Jackson Mac Low's overheard New York, Yau's new...
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John Yau, Author Black Sparrow Press $15.95 (169p) ISBN 978-0-87685-956-8
The world that prolific poet, art critic and man-about-New York Yau (Crossing Canal Street) creates in his first collection of short fiction is not a happy or comfortable place. Through different first-person narrators in each of 13 stories, Yau...
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John Yau, Author Black Sparrow Press $16.95 (0p) ISBN 978-1-57423-016-1
The latest collection from poet, short-story writer and art critic Yau is heavily weighted to prose poems dense with description and extensive linguistic flexing. Trading narrative line for phantasmagoria, the prose poems fail when Yau's ideas are...
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John Yau, Author Black Sparrow Press $17.95 (165p) ISBN 978-1-57423-168-7
No longer a cop, inactive as a private eye, classic loner Alex McKnight has retreated to his lakeside cabin in this superb yarn, Edgar-winner Hamilton's fourth after 2001's The Hunting Wind. In fact, Alex has become so much a recluse in the...
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John Yau, Author Black Sparrow Press $26.95 (169p) ISBN 978-0-87685-957-5
The world that prolific poet, art critic and man-about-New York Yau (Crossing Canal Street) creates in his first collection of short fiction is not a happy or comfortable place. Through different first-person narrators in each of 13 stories, Yau...
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John Yau, Author Black Sparrow Press $31.5 (180p) ISBN 978-1-57423-169-4
No longer a cop, inactive as a private eye, classic loner Alex McKnight has retreated to his lakeside cabin in this superb yarn, Edgar-winner Hamilton's fourth after 2001's The Hunting Wind. In fact, Alex has become so much a recluse in the...
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John Yau, Author Zoland Books $16.95 (124p) ISBN 978-0-944072-75-2
If you already have a weighty, profusely illustrated book on the artist Jasper Johns but are still a little bemused, this is the book to buy. Writer and curator Yau (Forbidden Entries) flinches at no aspect of a career he follows from ""Flag,"" the...
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John Yau, Author, Paul Labell, Editor ABRAMS $49.5 (127p) ISBN 978-0-8109-3725-3
Painter/sculptor A. R. Penck, who survived the Allied WW II firebombing of his native city of Dresden when he was four, developed a graphic vocabulary of symbols, words and images to mount a subversive critique of the rigid, repressive East German...
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John Yau, Author Black Sparrow Press $28.95 (200p) ISBN 978-1-57423-062-8
Awkward metaphors and a lack of narrative drive plague the 34 very short entries in this sometimes exasperating collection from poet and critic Yau (Forbidden Entries). The volume is divided into six sections, the first of which occupies roughly...
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John Yau, Author . Penguin $18 (92p) ISBN 978-0-14-303715-6
The 46 poems of Yau's new collection take up the themes and procedures of his previous work—absurdist narration, visual art (Yau is a prolific art critic), the workings and failings of language—and also delve more intimately into...
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John Yau. Copper Canyon (Consortium, dist.), $15 trade paper (174p) ISBN 978-1-55659-396-3
Built on the principle that poetry is servant to no organizing principle, Yau’s poems continue to agitate and explore identity and personal mythos by way of a mind that is beholden to nothing save its own wanderlust. His latest collection exhibits...
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John Yau. Omnidawn, $17.95 trade paper (152p) ISBN 978-1-63243-100-4
Yau’s latest brilliant (after Bijou in the Dark) brims with social critique and the linguistic play for which the poet is known, while also being suggestive of a writer and artist eager to situate his multifaceted work in the context of a collapsing
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John Yau. Omnidawn, $22.95 trade paper (74p) ISBN 978-1-63243-125-7
Yau’s charming latest (after Genghis Chan on Drums) reflects on a lifetime of making art from the periphery. Playing on the eponymous phrase, Yau explores artistic process and the limits of communication, all under the specter of anti-Asian hate and
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John Yau. Black Sparrow, $28.95 (232p) ISBN 978-1-574-23261-5
In this revelatory volume, poet and critic Yau (Ruth Asawa) challenges the art world’s omission and misrepresentation of Black, Asian, Latinx, and Native American artists. The author reflects on overlooked 20th-century sculptors, painters, and...
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