Flesh, Tongue - Tapa blanda

"Yao's work plays freely with line breaks and treats the printed page like a canvas, engaging with both the translinguistic and the spatial aspects of reading." --Wasafiri "Yao's poems, 44 in total, tell of the need for a continuous narrative and context for one's place in the world." --New Canadian Media "Simple yet piercing, filled with sparse, pungent details these poems remind us of the loss that makes life so painful and yet so sweet. Yaya Yao both confronts us and comforts us with the double-edgedness of immigration and its legacy, offering us a way back to where we never left." --Thea Lim, author of The Same Woman

As a child of immigrants, Yaya Yao always "craved an unbroken narrative: an arc that would give my existence a sense of context and continuity." In this brilliant and provocative first collection she confronts her inherited fragmented self and her hunger for a home, using scraps of personal and communal memory to bridge languages, worldviews, and physical distance from the ancestral homeland. Bits of Cantonese, Mandarin, Hokkien, and Shanghainese are translated and altered to explore the dynamics between language and identity. In this collection, Yaya Yao has created a unique and authentic voice.