SOURCE: Devaney, Tom. Review of Borrowed Love Poems, by John Yau. Rain Taxi Online 7, no. 3 (fall 2002) http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2002fall/yau.shtml.

In the following review, Devaney asserts that “spilling over with formal mastery, Borrowed Love Poems is an utterly pleasurable collection.”

John Yau's recent Borrowed Love Poems is a dazzling exploration of deft and unforgiving openness. The poems engage the reader with a wide and wild array of characters, disembodied and otherwise, with an imaginative and capacious use of the lyric “I.” It is a collection fed on a steady diet of movies, modernism, and all manner of mercurial identity, swift perception, and modes and inventive odes of riddling otherhood.

In this impressive 130-page collection, Yau offers new poems and continues series such as his “Genghis Chan: Private Eye” in addition to his long “Vowel Sonatas,” and various poems to and about painters, poets, musicians...