Edificio Sayonara

Poetry from an observer on the Asian-American experience and much more in life and on this earth.

Memory’s branch quivers / beneath the weight of a butterfly
How am I to know what it wants / without asking
Could it be that simple, the question / and then answer…

Inclues the sequence “Odes,” “Big Island Notebook,” “Genghis Chan: Private Eye,” “Postcards from Trakl,” and “Angel Atropado.”

Godine, Publisher | Black Sparrow Press is distributed to the trade by Two Rivers Distribution, an Ingram brand. For more info, click here.

John Yau is an award-winning poet and fiction writer who has been publishing art criticism since 1978. He is a professor of critical studies at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. He served as the arts editor of The Brooklyn Rail from 2006 – 2011, and then began writing for Hyperallergic Weekend. In 2021, Yau was awarded the Rabkin Prize for excellence in visual arts journalism.

His books of art criticism include In the Realm of Appearances: The Art of Andy Warhol and A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns, as well as monographs on Wifredo Lam, Thomas Nozkowski, Joe Brainard, Catherine Murphy, Richard Artschwager, Liu Xiaodong, and Kim Tschang-yeul.

Yau’s previous book from Black Sparrow Press include Edificio Sayonara, Hawaiian Cowboys, Forbidden Entries, My Symptoms, and My Heart is that Eternal Rose Tattoo.