:) Second Edition shipping October 15th :)
“The lit-up screen, the fractured mall, an ant infestation in an apartment — the worlds Yuyi Chen create collapse and are reconstructed in Erotic Continent, enacting the speculative nature of dislocation. “What’s inside of me is now outside,” Chen writes, “what’s out-side rises above the bodies / of glorious past.” Reading these poems is like moving through a dream, the floor shifting below us, toward a homecoming—internal and external, imagined or real.” - Emily Lee Luan
“A cultural anthropologist & queer phenomenologist, Sichuan’s Yuyi Chen heatmaps sociopolitical & infrapersonal landscapes with an inclination compass tilted & tinted by the dual powers of desire & survival in city life. Plain language is a surface plot in a diasporic irrealis mood where coordinates are deliberately tender, delightfully obtuse, decadently irreverent, & deliriously entropic. The lyricism recalls the pickled fusion kitsch of Hsia Yu, the more picante, pinyin, & picaro stylings of John Yau — but really, it’s all Yuyi: a nonpareil new voice. No, they can’t make it less spicy. Now read it.” - Aristilde Kirby
"Descending and ascending ladders to the Platonic realm of forms while remaining washed in humanity’s actual—terrestrial and quotidian—dynamics, Erotic Continent staggers then holds—a transfiguring poetical tractor beam. En-trance: house, porn, family, fuck. Here we re-live our mutually plotted quests towards romance and home between the then of coming-up to the world and the now of being in it. That geoposition “home”—so pivotal here—is as food to Tantalus, an ever furtive site sought after, yet infinitely unobtainable despite all our intimate entanglements within it. Yuyi Chen’s poems oscillate so naturally across the emotional paradigms of these near-universal searches—jettisoned into desperation and dissatisfaction towards a pleasure principle—that one realizes the poet’s hands have woven light beams, singing." - Thom Eichelberger-Young
:) Second Edition shipping October 15th :)
“The lit-up screen, the fractured mall, an ant infestation in an apartment — the worlds Yuyi Chen create collapse and are reconstructed in Erotic Continent, enacting the speculative nature of dislocation. “What’s inside of me is now outside,” Chen writes, “what’s out-side rises above the bodies / of glorious past.” Reading these poems is like moving through a dream, the floor shifting below us, toward a homecoming—internal and external, imagined or real.” - Emily Lee Luan
“A cultural anthropologist & queer phenomenologist, Sichuan’s Yuyi Chen heatmaps sociopolitical & infrapersonal landscapes with an inclination compass tilted & tinted by the dual powers of desire & survival in city life. Plain language is a surface plot in a diasporic irrealis mood where coordinates are deliberately tender, delightfully obtuse, decadently irreverent, & deliriously entropic. The lyricism recalls the pickled fusion kitsch of Hsia Yu, the more picante, pinyin, & picaro stylings of John Yau — but really, it’s all Yuyi: a nonpareil new voice. No, they can’t make it less spicy. Now read it.” - Aristilde Kirby
"Descending and ascending ladders to the Platonic realm of forms while remaining washed in humanity’s actual—terrestrial and quotidian—dynamics, Erotic Continent staggers then holds—a transfiguring poetical tractor beam. En-trance: house, porn, family, fuck. Here we re-live our mutually plotted quests towards romance and home between the then of coming-up to the world and the now of being in it. That geoposition “home”—so pivotal here—is as food to Tantalus, an ever furtive site sought after, yet infinitely unobtainable despite all our intimate entanglements within it. Yuyi Chen’s poems oscillate so naturally across the emotional paradigms of these near-universal searches—jettisoned into desperation and dissatisfaction towards a pleasure principle—that one realizes the poet’s hands have woven light beams, singing." - Thom Eichelberger-Young
