SOURCE: Xiaojing, Zhou. “Postmodernism and Subversive Parody: John Yau's ‘Genghis Chan: Private Eye’ Series.” College Literature 31, no. 1 (winter 2004): 73-102.

In the following essay, Xiaojing argues that Yau's “Genghis Chan” series “connects postmodernism in poetry to debates about postmodernism and Asian American identity in ways that engage larger issues concerning the relationship between postmodern discourses and minority American literatures.”

Alluding to critical reception of his poetry, John Yau refers to himself as “the poet who is too postmodern for the modernists and too modern for the postmodernists” (1994, 40). Yau's poems evoke different schools of poetry and mix multiple genres. “I am an indigestible vapor rising from the dictionary / you sweep under your embroidered pillow,” says the speaker in his poem “Peter Lorre Records His Favorite Walt Whitman Poem For Posterity” (1999c 159).¹ Elements of Surrealism, popular culture, history, and deconstruction coexist in Yau's poetry. In one of his recent prose poems...