Tell it Slant

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Poems that consider doubleness and truth-telling through the voice of an Asian American poet, while referencing a range of writers and pop culture figures.  
Emily Dickinson begins one of her poems with the oft-quoted line, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant." For Asian Americans, the word “slant” can be heard and read two ways, as both a racializing and an obscuring term. It is this sense of doubleness—culminating in the instability of language and an untrustworthy narrator—that shapes, informs, and inflects the poems in John Yau’s new collection, all of which focus on the questions of who is speaking and who is being spoken for and to. Made up of eight sections, each exploring 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. Yau summons spirits who help the author “tell all the truth,” among whom are reimagined traces of poets, movie stars, and science fiction writers, including Charles Baudelaire, Thomas de Quincey, Philip K. Dick, Li Shangyin, and Elsa Lanchester.
  John Yau is the author of many books, most recently, a selection of essays, Please Wait by the Coatroom: Reconsidering Race and Identity in American Art; a monograph, Joe Brainard: The Art of the Personal; and a volume of poetry, Genghis Chan on Drums, also published by Omnidawn. He received the 2018 Jackson Poetry Prize, a Rabkin Award for his art criticism in 2021, and the Culture-Warren Award for poetry from the Hunan Academy of Poetry in 2022. He lives and works in New York.

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