Author Description

Poetry. Art. Asian American Studies. Shin Yu Pai's poetry combines bare sensitivity and precision critique. In SIGHTINGS: SELECTED WORKS [2000-2005] she skillfully brings together four different poetic approaches to draw attention to the language of the commonplace and innervate tensions in the social familiar. Each project is drafted with a deft sense of position and line. Shin Yu Pai's poems are concrete objects of concern. Her eye for detail incises the subterranean erotics of gymnasiums, mass transit, and grocery stores. She transports the reader into the fissures of somatic displacement that scar the surface of everyday life. In SIGHTINGS, Shin Yu Pai delivers a rare optic, one capable of uncanny reflection and conveying the immediacy of feeling"--David Michalski.