Paradiso Diaspora (Poets, Penguin)

As the anagram of its title suggests, the poems, prose, lyrics, and memoir in John Yau’s new collection focus on an inescapable duality. It is the duality of living in both painted gardens and in the shadows of historic events that sweep one along. Yau explores the language of telling, of biography, auto and otherwise, of landscapes that are simultaneously imaginary and real, of ways to enter and leave "the kingdom of poetry." This is a book of displacements and unpredictable associations, of "last confessions" and "coming attractions," at once haunted and haunting.