For now I am sitting here growing transparent

by Yau Ching

As an award-winning video artist and queer community organizer, Hong Kong poet Yau Ching brings crisp imagery and a socially-engaged outlook to her work.
Simultaneously erudite and earthy, her poetry is shaped by Hong Kong's cultural position on the margins of mainland China and at the center of the Cantonese-speaking world. But her time spent in New York, London, Michigan, Taiwan, and elsewhere also informs her work, as do a breast cancer diagnosis in 2009, and her long-time work advocating for sexual minorities.

Yau's oeuvre explores gender, aesthetics, colonialism, relationships, and illness with a wide range of emotions and registers, and frequently employs wordplay. This bilingual collection includes astute political poems, understated love poems, urban anti-eclogues, and prose poems.

Genres: Poetry

120 pages, Paperback

Published February 18, 2025

Reviews

[Neil Shah · Rating 4 out of 5]

VERY random read for me but i picked it up at this niche poetic bookstore in pingtung city because it was the only book with any english in it. it’s a set of poems written IN CANTONESE INFLECTED MANDARIN that are then provided in english on the next page so dual language read with a lot of interesting linguistic observations made. what was the coolest by far about these poems was how the poet incorporated the political, social, and physical changes happening in hong kong and discussed them by writing poems that depicted how those changes manifested themselves in mundane hong kong life. lots of interesting takes on how colonialism/greed/money/ a constructed form of hong kong identity are all spiraling together to take apart a unique version of life. While there were some “mango tree” esque references here and there, the actual content didn’t feel like part of it was using the exotic nature of being as a asian or having asian culture for its only objective. this is prolly because the author’s intended audience was possibly other people like her.

[Biblibio · Rating 3 out of 5]

The best of these poems are absolutely excellent. Most of the others didn't do much for me. But the balance between the two meant that I generally appreciated this collection, particularly since it spanned different poetic styles and approaches.

[elly · Rating 4 out of 5]

it’s no wonder history is so