100 Chinese Silences

There are one hundred kinds of Chinese silence: the silence of unknown grandfathers; the silence of borrowed Buddha and rebranded Confucius; the silence of alluring stereotypes and exotic reticence. These poems make those silences heard. Writing back to an "orientalist" tradition that has defined modern American poetry, these 100 Chinese silences unmask the imagined Asias of American literature, revealing the spectral Asian presence that haunts our most eloquent lyrics and self-satisfied wisdom. Rewriting poets from Ezra Pound and Marianne Moore to Gary Snyder and Billy Collins, this book is a sharply critical and wickedly humorous travesty of the modern canon, excavating the Asian (American) bones buried in our poetic language.

Timothy Yu is the author of the poetry collection 100 Chinese Silences and three chapbooks: 15 Chinese Silences, Journey to the West, and, with Kristy Odelius, Kiss the Stranger. He is also the author of Diasporic Poetics: Asian Writing in the United States, Canada, and Australia (Oxford) and Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry since 1965 (Stanford). He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First-Century American Poetry and Nests and Strangers: On Asian American Women Poets. His work has appeared in Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, Fence, and The New Republic. He is the Martha Meier Renk-Bascom Professor of Poetry and professor of English and Asian American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and serves as executive editor of Contemporary Literature.