The Ninth Island
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Pub Date Feb 9 2027 | Archive Date Feb 9 2027
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Description
Wandering and referential poems rooted in inheritance and place, which trace the familial and political arc of displacement and return with humor, tenderness, and rage.
For half a century, people from Hawai’i have called Las Vegas “The Ninth Island.” First the product of relentless advertising from casinos and airlines, now a strange truth as so many have left the islands to make lives in the desert. The Ninth Island follows Yim’s family and their years of displacement, from childhood homes to the far western edges of O’ahu, into the delirious heat of Southern Nevada. With humor, clear-eyed rage, and an abiding tenderness, Yim’s wandering poems craft makeshift homes across an unfamiliar American landscape.
The book’s second movement speaks across time to the poet’s paternal great-grandmother—born on O’ahu in the era of Chinese Exclusion and paper children then exiled to China, her documents sold to another girl—tracing an intergenerational arc of inheritance and return. Politically and emotionally capacious, The Ninth Island reckons with familial silences, hoop dreams, intertwining griefs, and the settler-colonial forces acting upon Hawai’i and the world. As impossible and necessary as an island in the desert, The Ninth Island marks the arrival of a fabulous new literary voice.
A Note From the Publisher
Advance Praise
"The Ninth Island somehow yearns as it collects. It collects human wreckage and the communally idiosyncratic while moving between the shine of diamonds and the grit of dust. Tussle, please, the poems whisper to each other. Andrew Chi Keong Yim has made an explosion that thankfully explodes in slow motion, from the top down. Absolutely dope as bookmaking gets."
--Kiese Laymon, author of Good, God
"Andrew Chi Keong Yim’s debut is a deeply soulful and searing interrogation of place, personhood, and belonging. With poems that range from hilarious to heartbreaking to stunningly poignant, The Ninth Island is a worthy introduction to a new poet that may well help define his generation’s lyric conscious. In a time where questions of borders, citizenship, and displacement animate our discourse at every level from local to international, what a gift to have a poet with such a necessary song on these subjects. Yim’s poems take up multiple intersecting questions of belonging in the colonial space of Hawaiʻi and well beyond those shores. Yim reminds us just how unsettled our present is and just how close the complicated past is to our fingertips."
--Nate Marshall, author of Finna and Something Blue
Marketing Plan
- Galley mailing
- National print and online reviews
- Online promotion
- Select author appearances
- Social media outreach
- Featured at AWP 2027
- Galley mailing
- National print and online reviews
- Online promotion
- Select author appearances
- Social media outreach
- Featured at AWP 2027
Available Editions
| EDITION | Paperback |
| ISBN | 9780822968719 |
| PRICE | $20.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 128 |