Poetry. Art. Asian American Studies. 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.

Sightings: Selected Works [2000-2005]

Literature & Fiction

Pai, Shin Yu

Poetry

1913 Press

Poetry. Hybrid Genre. Asian &amp; Asian American Studies. Performance Studies. Music. Women's Studies. It is fitting that we'd present a hybrid book and digital experience for Shin Yu Pai, a poet known for her wide-ranging collaborations and creative practice engaged as much in physical space as a moment on the page. With its blend of personal essays reflecting on the development of her poetics, ENS? places new work next to old, to create not only a mid-career retrospective, but a guidebook for poets interested in moving their practice off the page and into the community. From her early work in place-based and ekphrastic poetry and her explorations of bookmaking, to her current experimentation with installation and projection, this book highlights the creative process to her poetry. The reader learns more about Ms. Pai's influences--the identities that resonate for her--and her thoughts on cultural hybridity, exchange and appropriation. She speaks deeply of how motherhood transformed her views of what is possible in poetry, reconnecting to her immigrant mother's creative legacy, and how that pushed her ideas to better inhabit the world around us. She gives moving examples of how personal and systematic racism and misogyny have shaped her practice, while inviting the reader into a deeper conversation about how a poet writes with and about their community. As a book interested in process, we have included within ENS? a second book of Ms. Pai's haiku in her discussion of haiku practice. As with all of our books, we include a wide range of audio projects and readings related to the book. We also include two video animations discussed in the book, "Heyday" and "Puget Sound Driftwood Circle."

Ensō

Entre Rios Books

Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. After decades of promoting the Chinese masters of poetry and Buddhist texts, Empty Bowl is honored to publish its first collection by a female Asian American author. VIRGA, Shin Yu Pai's elegant eleventh collection of poems, is a crisp and intelligent response to recent and ancient history. In poems at once visionary and practical, VIRGA portrays Buddhist thought from lived experience, and demonstrates the everyday life of a poet who can see for herself in the "shafts of rain going sublime" the reality of being an Asian American woman in America today. This collection rediscovers who we are in an age when hate-crimes and terrorization destroy the lives of Asians and all people of color. Experiencing these poems, we witness Shin Yu Pai rise in and through the wearying atmosphere of the "dominant caste," as historian Isabel Wilkerson calls white culture, to hold herself, her child, her community, in that sublime state that, within the Zen mind, arises "before touching the ground."

Virga

Empty Bowl

Drawing its name from photographer Alfred Stieglitz's series of cloud images, the poems in this collection from poet Shin Yu Pai explore connections and correspondences between poetry and the visual arts, Eastern and Western cultures, tradition and modernity, perpetual migration and the sense of home. In the course of this exploration, the poet is inspired by modern and contemporary artists such as Wolfgang Laib, Piet Mondrian, Joseph Cornell, Yoko Ono, and Felix Gonzales-Torres.
"Shin Yu Pai's imagination is like a fine pottery bowl, delicately shaped but capable of holding many things: playfulness, candor, descriptive elegance. She is working out her own welcome blend of cultures, Eastern and Western, and Equivalence is the lovely and often challenging result."--Rosellen Brown 
"Shin Yu Pai matches a painter's grasp of the materiality of things with the poet's trick of arranging words for maximum musical effect. She knows that in poetry it is the music that keeps in the mind what is seen. Her poems honor their imagist heritage by making it new."--William Corbett
"Shin Yu Pai's voice is equal parts exciting, exuberant and elegant. Equivalence serves as a profound dual act of grace and wisdom. This poet has carved out a bold, wondrous space on our mountain, complete with unspeakable vistas that stretch clear toward the earth's edge."--Jim Behrle 
Equivalence received a 2003 grant from the Cambridge Arts Council and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

Equivalence: Poems

La Alameda Press

"Adamantine bristles with taut, startling language that continues to yield surprises even after readers realize that they are at serious play within the fields of the human heart, a realm in which 'we must know when to give in.'"–Carolyne Wright"How wise of her to know that what is adamantine is the open heart. Fearless seeing, ancient mutterings on contemporary pathways and boulevards, inventive poetics, merciless memories and tender, knowing hands all take their proper place here."—Peter LevittShin Yu Pai is the author of several collections including Sightings: Selected Works and Equivalence.

Adamantine

White Pine Press