SOURCE: Foster, Edward Halsey. “John Yau and the Seductions of Everything That Used to Be.” Multicultural Review 3, no. 1 (March 1994): 36-9.

In the following essay, Foster discusses Yau as a Chinese American poet, contending that “his work has much wider implications than such labels may imply.”

You ask. What words will return us to the words we were using yesterday? …

Instead of answering, I tell you that I have decided to return my hands to their owners, and begin packing for the journey to the bus station.

—John Yau “Big Island Notebook 11”

John Yau's poems are startling thoroughfares defining their own very intricate linguistic necessities.

Words or images or what detonates them when they no longer point to events they name their trajectories splitting the sky implanted in his cranial orbit. 

Yau has been seen as a major Chinese-American poet, perhaps the most important of our time, but his...