Yu’s 100 Chinese Silences is a vital voice among this chorus that is growing louder by the minute speaking, singing and shouting the new sound of what it means to be Asian in America...
At times, the irony can become difficult to decipher. Indeed, his poems hold multiple meanings, opening a much-needed conversation about how Asian American voices are simultaneously appropriated and silenced....
The intent here seems clear enough: Timothy Yu is sick of the orientalist uses made of Chinese culture and its poetry by ‘western’ poets and others that instrumentally enable their own poetries...
Both an epic poem and an annotated bibliography of Latin American Antígonas, Antígona González is a work of documentary excess and heartbreaking silence...