The Year of Blue Water by Yanyi reads like a diary and indeed, I believe the author had intended it to be written and read that way. I'm not very familiar with the prose poem format and sometimes I got confused with the flow of the poetry. There are plenty of quotable sentences and it is definitely a book that invites you to reread and ponder in silence.

"then, what is so unnatural to me: to believe that what i can't control will be kind to me. when you walk away from me, i hear you saying that you will always be with me. when i wake up. i hear you telling me it's okay. things eventually happen. it's not always true that when someone disappears, they never come back, even if that has been my experience."

this book was very eye opening, heart opening, to the life and struggles of someone who is transgender. but also of the greatness their life can be even amidst it all once they find that comfort and ability to show themselves, sometimes losses will exist, but it will also show you who cares about you for you, who accepts you as you are and not what they choose to view you as just because it may be what they had previously known. everyone has a right to present as they know they're meant to and not uphold others expectations that will only damage them.

The Year of Blue Water by Yanyi is a collection of mostly prose poems covering a variety of current identity issues. Yanyi is a poet and critic who has received fellowships from the Asian American Writers' Workshop, Poets House, and the Millay Colony for the Arts.

Racism, gender identity, orientation, and the idea of duality come into play in the poems. The poems themselves flow like stream of consciousness, but the stream seems much more polished with a natural structure and refinement.

What you touch will come to life: a whole room sprung in backwards words of people untalking to you.

The topics gently shift and flow. Being poor as a child and longing for Cherioes because they were so much better than the cheap copies. Later in life depression -- being trapped in one's self and part of the self not wanting to go on or taking personality tests to find out the person you are supposed because you are unable to or confused by what you think of yourself. Boundaries of one's self are more complex than nineteenth-century French cities whose boundaries were set by the reach of the church bells peal.

The Year of Blue Water is a deep and exploratory account of one person's life and confusion when examining one's self and the world around. Masculinity is no longer driven by the male John Wayne figure and feminity no longer constrained by either June Cleaver. In the seventies, one British band would explain that "It was a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world." Then it was a fringe idea today the grey areas become much more substantial than in the old duality. The order of a binary system has seemed to fade in everything from health and unhealthy to the world locked in as capitalist and communist systems. Yanyi explores the complexity of his own life in this fluid collection of prose poetry.

These prose poems from trans poet Yanyi explore identity and anxiety, examining the relationship between the cerebral and the emotional. As Carl Phillips notes in the introduction, the prose form gives the book a diaristic feel, and that suits the central concern of the book (which I interpreted as the desire to bridge a divided external and internal self) as well as the tone of the poems, which I found to be tender and intimate, a speaker writing with patience and compassion as he works to understand and assert a developing sense of self.

This is a lost person desperatly trying to be someone. I don't believe this could be call poetry? It reads like a series of pages from a note book of random thoughts, conversations and dreams. It was an interesting if repedative read. Yanyi is looking to be part of a family and group a tribe. This is solely a female community. They seem to be selecting other peoples traits and gluing the on themselves trying to constantly remake themsevles in order to fit in? They need other people permission to exist? However, having said that I can see that I too went through my teenage years trying to fit in, to be like by the people I admired. One day alone on a hilltop it came to me. I am me! Being singular and alone I am unique. I can share me with other people. I would say to Yanyi, you are beautiful and unique celebrate that. YOU ARE, SO BE !

"There are places I can't go, like outside my body."

Self-knowledge, the power of friendship and of the arts, self-awareness, queer experience all communicated through prose poetry; Yanyi's vulnerability, sincerity and emotional reactivity to her life as an immigrant Chinese American are palpable throughout the collection.

"What I also mean to say is that I recognize the focus. The impulse to know someone else before you reveal yourself. The impulse to know someone else because you have never been asked to reveal yourself. The impulse to know someone else because otherwise, you do not know yourself. The impulse to know someone else because you are self-conscious of your whole self, the one that fills up too many rooms, so much space. The impulse to hide how much space you need. The impulse to hide what you need."