Genghis Chan on Drums

the long version

"At once comic and cantankerous, tender and discomfiting, piercing and irreverent, Genghis Chan on Drums is a shape-shifting book of percussive poems dealing with aging, identity, PC culture, and stereotypes about being Chinese via a wide range of surprising forms (pantoums and sonnets) and unlikely subjects, including the 1930s Hollywood actress Carole Lombard, the Latin poet Catullus, the fantastical Renaissance painter Piero di Cosimo's imaginary sister, and a nameless gumshoe. Seemingly without effort, Yau can go from using the rhyme scheme of an Edmund Spenser sonnet written in the 16th century, to riffing on a well-known poem-rant by the English poet Sean Bonney (1969 - 2019), to limiting himself to the words of condolence sent by a former president to the survivors of a school massacre. Yau's poems are conduits through which many different, conflicting, and even unsavory voices strive to be heard"--