SOURCE: Friedman, B. H. “Always Street-Smart.” American Book Review 14, no. 4 (October-November 1992): 20.

In the following favorable assessment of Big City Primer, Friedman describes the collaboration between Yau and photographer Bill Barrette.

In these pages, in 1982, I reviewed the first six books of John Yau's poetry. I liked his work then, and I like it now, seven books later. His most recent volume, Big City Primer, is a collaboration between him and Bill Barrette, photographer and sculptor. Barrette's shifting vision—sometimes frontal, sometimes angular, always street-smart—and his technical ability to present the intense blacks and whites and subtle grays of the cityscape complement Yau's new prose poems. However, this is not a “perfect” collaboration: neither in the sense that James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is thought to be—a piety that should be laid to rest, since Evans's straightforward photography only emphasizes Agee's...