Bøker av John Yau

"Emily Dickinson begins one of her best-known poems with the oft-quoted line, "Tell all the truth but tell it slant -" For anyone who is Asian American, the word "slant" can be heard and read two ways. It is this sense of doubleness - culminating in the instability of language and an untrustworthy narrator - that shapes, informs, and inflects the poems, all of which focus on the question of who is speaking and who is being spoken for and to? Made up of eight sections, each of which explores the idea of address - as place, as person, as memory, and as event - Tell It Slant does as Dickinson commands, but with a further twist. Among the summoned spirits who help the author "tell all the truth," the reader will hear reimagined traces of poets, movie stars, and science fiction writers - including Charles Baudelaire, Thomas de Quincey, Philip K. Dick, Li Shangyin, and Elsa Lanchester - among the multitudes contained"--

Please Wait by the Coat Room is for readers interested in the art and artists of color that many mainstream institutions and critics misrepresented or overlooked. It presents a view guided by the artists' desire for autonomy and freedom in a culture that has deemed them undesirable or invisible.

The first major publication in twenty years on the prodigious and innovative work of this beloved twentieth-century New York multimedia artist and poet, whose work in collage and assemblage transformed the ordinary into the beautiful. Known for his internationally popular memoir, I Remember, which uniquely captures 1950s America, Joe Brainard (1942–1994) was also a prolific and beloved artist. This beautifully illustrated book covers the entire range of his versatile art, including hundreds of drawings, collages, assemblages, prints, and paintings, many unpublished or never exhibited. Brainard was closely associated with the New York School, a community of poets and artists such as Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Alex Katz, Jane Freilicher, Larry Rivers, and Fairfield Porter, who thrived in downtown Manhattan in the 1960s and ’70s. Brainard transformed ordinary objects and ephemera collected from his Lower East Side neighborhood into stunning assemblages and collages. The book brings together Brainard’s classic subjects, such as the comic strip heroine Nancy; Madonnas (inspired by Ukrainian images in the Lower East Side); his iconic pansies, poppies, and daisies; and erotic works (male torsos). Poet and art critic John Yau describes in vivid detail how Brainard produced thousands of lush multimedia pieces radiant with poignancy, wit, intimacy, and a sheer beauty that express Brainard’s unabashed affection for the world.

"At once comic and cantankerous, tender and discomfiting, piercing and irreverent, Genghis Chan on Drums is a shape-shifting book of percussive poems dealing with aging, identity, PC culture, and stereotypes about being Chinese via a wide range of surprising forms (pantoums and sonnets) and unlikely subjects, including the 1930s Hollywood actress Carole Lombard, the Latin poet Catullus, the fantastical Renaissance painter Piero di Cosimo's imaginary sister, and a nameless gumshoe. Seemingly without effort, Yau can go from using the rhyme scheme of an Edmund Spenser sonnet written in the 16th century, to riffing on a well-known poem-rant by the English poet Sean Bonney (1969 - 2019), to limiting himself to the words of condolence sent by a former president to the survivors of a school massacre. Yau's poems are conduits through which many different, conflicting, and even unsavory voices strive to be heard"--

The remarkable plein air paintings of Liu Xiaodong (b.1963), which chronicle everyday lives within our diverse modern world, are the focus of this first monograph of his career to date. Immersing himself in communities around the globe, Xiaodong seeks to present people who often sit on the fringes of society who find themselves marginalised within a contemporary world striving for homogenisation. At first glance a traditional realist painter, closer examination reveals an artist exploring a range of media while interrogating the opportunities presented by modern technology. The result is an outstanding body of work, often monumental in scale, that examines, reconsiders, and extends observational painting in fresh directions, while bringing into question the lines between fact and fiction, the traditional and the contemporary, to create a wholly original vision.

The first illustrated monograph to survey the work to date of major American painter Philip Taaffe (b.1955), whose work has expanded the parameters of painting through a fascinating layering of different techniques and imagery, including marbling, silkscreen, collage and linocut.

Focusses on some of the renowned poets and artists, such as John Ashbery, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Robert Creeley. This work contains eleven essays, which include: ""Passionate Spectator: On Frank O'Hara's Art Criticism""; ""At the Movies with Weldon Kees and Frank O'Hara""; ""The Poet as Art Critic (On John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara)""; and more.