"It Was Our First Great Sorrow" and "The Best Things in Life" in Shenandoah Journal

In the first week of the pandemic, when we didn't know this would last for more than a year, when we created a bunker life in a one-bedroom apartment, these two poems poured out of me. In "It Was Our First Great Sorrow," I imagined what hell would be like if it were made of flowers, when something beautiful turns into the tragic. Then in a burst of uncharacteristic positivity, I thought about how phrases like "the best things in life" are so familiar yet unknown and undefinable. Those moments that make you feel on a visceral level that life is precious are the ones that surprise, the ones that defy rational explanations. Now, more than a year after that bunker life, Shenandoah Journal has put these poems out in the world, and the world has changed so much, yet in some ways, not at all.

Read the rest of "It Was Our First Great Sorrow" and "The Best Things in Life."

And check out the full issue of writers I'm lucky to be sharing space with, including Anna Maria Hong and a new translation of Adonis!

Poem "Into the Moraine" in Michigan Quarterly Review

 

I'm lucky enough to live in a place where it's easy to go to the mountains. It's also easy to see and feel just how fast the glaciers are melting due to climate change. You will see a stark naked line where the greenery stops, and there’s only rubble below, all the way into the valley where ice used to be. You feel the pain of it, because that hiking path has been buried under a rockfall. If you ski down the Vallee Blanche, you'll end the route at least 12 stories below the train platform, and every step climbing up the stairs, skis on your back, your feet aching in those heavy boots, you're reminded of how much bigger the glacier used to be just a few decades ago.

This poem was one way to make that pain visible to the rest of the world. It's never too late to start.

Many thanks to Hannah Webster and all of the Michigan Quarterly Review editors for including it in their latest print issue, as well as Khaled Mattawa for the deeply inspiring foreword. Order your copy here.

Le Tour Glacier, France

Poem "Sky Burial" in Poetry Northwest's 60th Anniversary

A slice of Tibet in the great Northwest. Check out my poem "Sky Burial" in the 60th anniversary issue of Poetry Northwest. Can't believe my name is on that gorgeous cover, and in awe of all the amazing poems mine is wedged between. I kept reading it weeks after, in the tram, by the lake, at the Vevey wine festival (left). Because what is wine without poetry?

www.poetrynw.org/summer-fall-2019-2/

Story "The Lady Clock" Nominated for Best Small Fictions 2018

Must be writers nomination season because here's another from Decomp Magazine for "The Lady Clock" - a story about a boy, a girl and a bouncing orchid in Geneva. OK now I can go home, eat a whole bag of chips AND chocolate almond bar, and dance like I've been drinking. Wait, I am drinking.

Read at: http://www.decompmagazine.com/theladyclock.htm

Pushcart Nomination from Writers Resist

A skyscraper-sized thank you to Writers Resist for nominating my poem "Market Value" for the Pushcart. I wrote this poem two years ago and workshopped it in Jamie McKendrick's class with Geneva Writers Group, and now it has been made part of a resistance. Feeling a wave of light just thinking about it.

People of words, of art, of strength, whatever form your resistance takes, please submit to the Writers Resist collective. We need your voice.

Read the poem here.

Poem "Market Value" in Writers Resist

On a fall day in 2015, the Chinese stock market dropped, which triggered a fall in all the other markets. I started thinking about the over financialization of our global economy. I started thinking about vegetable markets. I started thinking about what I knew then and how little I know now. Then this poem came.

Read "Market Value" on Writers Resist.

Poem "Second Child" in Roanoke Review

Starting the year off right thanks to Roanoke Review who just featured my poem “Second Child” about China’s change from one-child to two-child policy. Check out the journal - they regularly feature stunning work (including new poems by Pulitzer-prize winning and founder Henry Taylor) plus they treat their writers with lots of kindness and support.

Read the poem and my commentary on the private impact of the policy here.

Poem "Philadelphia" in Offshoots Journal

My poem “Philadelphia” has just appeared in Offshoots Journal! I wrote this on a scrap of paper when my train broke down in Philadelphia, and I was waiting for my Dad to drive up from DC and rescue me. I started thinking of the long drive ahead for him, and about how he has spent so much time over the years driving me to school, piano lessons, to the airport when I left home, picking me up when I come home. All my life he has been rescuing me. He always seemed a giant to me.

Read more in Offshoots Journal 13, goes great with a cup of joe: http://www.genevawritersgroup.org/offshoots/offshoots-13/

New Poems in Maudlin House

BIG thanks to Maudlin House for including four of my poems in their monthly writing plus art peanut-butter-jelly goodness:

• "Unpublished Diaries of the Philae" on the comet lander
• "Airplane Song"
• "Top-Roping"
• "Blind Underline"

http://maudlinhouse.net/four-poems-by-yun-wei/