Judges' Comments

Anatomy of A Wave by Yong Shu Hong is a breathtaking collection, staggering in its genius creation. The entire work simply soars in its aesthetic conception and execution. The collection is riveting with its great lyric/narrative coherence, around which perambulates such interesting, stark tangents. At its deeply confessional, one encounters a beautiful honesty and authenticity. At its most innovative, one receives a wondrous sense of playfulness and contingency. What remains luminous is its constantly shifting textualities; yet, what is consistently reproduced is a lustrous polish. There resides a cool clarity—lucid, pristine. It just all holds together brilliantly.

When Yong writes, “Strange how things take on lives/of their own–Hokusai, serving/As inspiration for other artists/ (Van Gogh, Camille Claudel, Hergé,/Hirohiko Araki…), offspring/spawning offspring,” he is following the threads of personal and cultural history, memory, and imagination.

Anatomy of a Wave is a book of poems with prose commentary, a sprawling, wild evocation of the 1980s, with its pop music, that reverberates with the present, serving to remind us how the new and necessary things we buy to enhance our lives become obsolete. This book memorializes a period in the poet’s life without descending into nostalgia and bathos. It is the clear-eyed view of a chronicler and visionary. He understands that the new creates waste, and that out of that waste poets can create poems. How can we change the cycle of consumption before it chokes us to death? What is it to remember a distant era whose traces remain? These poems are political, personal, funny, and sorrowful.

Here is a collection which offers a subtle musicality that is quietly mesmeric on the level of language. Each re-reading results in a sense that Yong’s skillful use of the lyric and prose poem allows for both complexity and clarity to co-exist in these poems. Particularly admirable is Yong’s use of imagery and intertextuality: within and across poems, images and ideas interact like waves building on top of one another. This is a moving and polyphonic book about writing, artistic influences, music, the self, the body, memory, love and place that feels deeply relevant to our times.

Yong is a major poet whose works deserve to be known throughout the world where people still care about poetry.