Sightings: Selected Works (2000-2005) [Paperback]

Shin Yu Pai (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 12, 2007

Shin Yu Pai's poetry combines bare sensitivity and precision critique. In Sightings: Selected Works [2000-2005] she skillfully brings together four different poetic approaches to draw attention to the language of the commonplace and innervate tensions in the social familiar. Each project is drafted with a deft sense of position and line. Shin Yu Pai's poems are concrete objects of concern. Her eye for detail incises the subterranean erotics of gymnasiums, mass transit, and grocery stores. She transports the reader into the fissures of somatic displacement that scar the surface of everyday life. In Sightings, Shin Yu Pai delivers a rare optic, one capable of uncanny reflection and conveying the immediacy of feeling. - David Michalski

Editorial Reviews

Review

The physicality of the work and her stunning visual experimentations originate from the body. Shin Yu Pai uses charts, diagrams and non-literary forms of all sorts, to poetically gauge the complexities of race and gender. Sightings: Selected Works is a gorgeous and brilliant collection. --Denise Duhamel

Shin Yu Pai's poems explode in a hundred urgent directions, with the incandescence of fireworks. Her book delves deep into modernist experiment, and draws back not out of fear nor from a respect for convention but only when the human imperative to communicate might otherwise be cut short. She is a young artist, of an age when a volume of selected poems might seem egregious, but in this case it is fascinating to watch, in Sightings, the dyer s own hand judge, then set aside for us, the best of her amazing production. --Kevin Killian

In Sightings, Shin Yu Pai disrupts voyeurism by an increasingly disruptive text. The dazzling effect of these dismembered texts, which range from an eye test to a play in verse composed from phrases from a Chinese-English phrase book, is akin to exquisite corpses, texts that are sexual, unconscious, and social hybrids that are not characterizations of culture, western society or imperialism. --Leslie Scalapino

About the Author

Shin Yu Pai is the author of Unnecessary Roughness (xPress(ed), 2005), Equivalence (La Alameda, 2003), and Ten Thousand Miles of Mountains and Rivers (Third Ear Books, 1998). Forthcoming projects include Works on Paper (Convivio Bookworks) and The Love Hotel Poems (Press Lorentz). Her work is anthologized in America Zen: A Gathering of Poets (Bottom Dog Press, 2004) and The Wisdom Anthology of North American Buddhist Poetry (Wisdom Publications, 2005). In addition to her work as a poet, she has exhibited her visual work at The Three Arts Club of Chicago, Gallery 2, The MAC, and the Gallery at the University of Texas at Dallas. She has collaborated with individual artists and groups as diverse at Hedwig Dances and the Hudson Exploited Theater Company. Shin Yu received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, with additional graduate level studies conducted at The Naropa Institute where she received the Hiro Yamagata and Zora Neale Hurston Scholarships. She has taught poetry at Southern Methodist University, The University of Texas at Dallas, The Writers Garret, The Cambridge Center for Adult Education, and Grub Street, Inc. and served as the 2004 Peter Taylor Fellow at Kenyon College. She has completed residencies at The MacDowell Colony, Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Taipei Artist Village, Ragdale Foundation, and the Southside on Lamar Residency Program at the University of Texas at Dallas.

Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: 1913 Press (February 12, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0977935116
• ISBN-13: 978-0977935116
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,081,235 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Shin Yu Pai is the author of seven books of poetry including Haiku Not Bombs (Booklyn, 2008), Sightings (1913 Press, 2007), Works on Paper (Convivio Bookworks, 2007), The Love Hotel Poems (Press Lorentz, 2007), Unnecessary Roughness (xPress(ed), 2005), Equivalence (La Alameda, 2003), and Ten Thousand Miles of Mountains and Rivers (Third Ear Books, 1998). White Pine Press will publish her latest collection, Adamantine, in Fall 2010. structure of the inner ear is in production with Cinematheque Press. She has been commissioned twice to compose poems responding to artworks in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art. Her work is featured in the Poetry in Motion program on the Dallas Area Rapid Transit system. She has taught poetry workshops at Southern Methodist University and The University of Texas at Dallas, and served as the 2004 Peter Taylor Fellow at Kenyon College.

Haiku Not Bombs is available at the Booklyn website at www.booklyn.org. Works on Paper is available through the Convivio Bookworks website at www.conviviobookworks.org. The Love Hotel Poems and Ten Thousand Miles of Mountains and Rivers are sold out, but can be purchased directly from the author by contacting her through her website at http://shinyupai.com.