A diverse and cacophonous poetry collection tackling subjects from identity to current events.

At once comic and cantankerous, tender and discomfiting, piercing and irreverent, Genghis Chan on Drums is a shape-shifting book of percussive poems dealing with aging, identity, PC culture, and stereotypes about being Chinese. Employing various forms, John Yau's poems traverse a range of subjects, including the 1930s Hollywood actress Carole Lombard, the Latin poet Catullus, the fantastical Renaissance painter Piero di Cosimo's imaginary sister, and a nameless gumshoe. Yau moves effortlessly from using the rhyme scheme of a sixteenth-century Edmund Spenser sonnet to riffing on a well-known poem-rant by the English poet Sean Bonney, and to immersing himself in the words of condolence sent by a former president to the survivors of a school massacre. Yau's poems are conduits through which many different, conflicting, and unsavory voices strive to be heard.


Author: John Yau
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Omnidawn
Published: 10/06/2021
Pages: 152
Weight: 0.55lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.50d
ISBN: 9781632431004


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 11/01/2021 pg. 91
Publishers Weekly 11/22/2021

About the Author
John Yau is a poet, art critic, fiction writer, and publisher whose recent books include Foreign Sounds or Sounds Foreign and Bijoux in the Dark. He founded Black Square Editions and cofounded the online magazine Hyperallergic Weekend. He has received awards and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment of the Arts, and Academy of American Poets, among others. He teaches at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University and lives in New York.