For Now I Am Sitting Here Growing Transparent

As an award-winning video artist and queer community organizer, Hong Kong poet Yau Ching brings crisp imagery and a socially-engaged outlook to her work.

Simultaneously erudite and earthy, her poetry is shaped by Hong Kong’s cultural position on the margins of mainland China and at the center of the Cantonese-speaking world. But her time spent in New York, London, Michigan, Taiwan, and elsewhere also informs her work, as do a breast cancer diagnosis in 2009, and her long-time work advocating for sexual minorities.

Yau’s oeuvre explores gender, aesthetics, colonialism, relationships, and illness with a wide range of emotions and registers, and frequently employs wordplay. This bilingual collection includes astute political poems, understated love poems, urban anti-eclogues, and prose poems.