Author Description

These responses to the work of John Yau come from different times and places, and come with different ambitions, and take up different modes of expression. Some are works of criticism, some are lyrical, some are works of art themselves. There are two interviews, a book review, a poem, even an introduction by Robert Kelly from Yau’s first book, Crossing Canal Street (1976). Each contribution furthers the talk of Yau. Each offers a three-count pour initiation into the imaginative expansiveness, the liberatory desires, the pained beauties, of one of the most extraordinary bodies of work in contemporary American poetry. —Joseph Donahue