Yanyi, a poet from Brooklyn, N.Y., has been selected as this year’s winner of the 2018 Yale Series of Younger Poets. His manuscript, The Year of Blue Water, was selected by Carl Phillips. 

 

“As its title implies, The Year of Blue Water reads as a record of time, a kind of daybook of observations in sentences so crystalline, spare, direct, and yet offhand, that it can be easy to miss, at first, the book’s complexity,” said Phillips. “The poems suggest a quest that has involved turning to many sources for guidance: tarot, therapy, an ongoing dialogue with writers (from Audre Lorde to Raymond Carver) and with the visual artist Agnes Martin in particular; and poems especially — the making of them — as ‘a way to ask for what exists, to invite what wants to be visible.’”

 

“This news will change my life and it is changing my life. It has been an honor and a privilege to be recognized – to have one’s work read, understood, and valued – in the same series that brought me voices that I sorely needed as a young writer,” said Yanyi.

 

Yale University Press will publish The Year of Blue Water in April 2019. 

 

Yanyi is a 2017-2018 Asian American Writers Workshop Margins Fellow, as well as the associate editor at Foundry. His work has appeared in The Margins, Memorious, and Model View Culture. Yanyi’s manuscript is the 113th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Series. Past winners of the prize include Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, and Robert Hass. 

 

 

Image Credit: Yanyi