Reviews for Shin Yu Pai

Review of Equivalence by Joyelle McSweeney (published in the Constant Critic )

Those professional mourners busy lamenting the current state of the poetry union—too many MFAs, too many first book prizes, too many first books, too many books—will be delighted (or perhaps vexed) to discover poet Shin Yu Pai. Though Equivalence was published by the perspicacious La Alameda Press without the occasion of a prize, Pai attended an MFA program and the book was nourished by a state grant and a visit to the MacDowell colony. And guess what? It’s a terrific, original, clean-lined book, which delivers quite a lot of substance with its polished style—more proof that the institutional support system helping young writers can be good, as opposed to deadly, for poetry.

Shin Yu Pai is also a visual artist—a photograph of hers serves as the book’s frontispiece—and most of these pieces are to some degree ekphrastic. Her descriptive strategies make the source paintings, scrolls, photographs, and sculptures tangibly present, even to those who aren’t familiar with them; then, with flickering subtlety, she shifts aesthetic frames back and forth, placing her speaker and her reader now inside, now outside the works at hand. In “The Gathering at the Orchid Pavilion,” the speaker minutely notes the space:

Entering a darkened room
to pass between sixteen pillars
of equal height and depth,
ten feet high and one foot square

I place my hand against the grain
hold my ear to a pillar
listening for something
like the sound of trees.

This plainspoken yet elegant tone continues, cataloguing “the shine of moss,” “bearded scholars on blankets”; although we are told of “six folded screens/ colored ink and gold on silk,” it is not till the speaker’s breath “clouds the casing” and “the door of the gallery opens” that we realize the speaker has entered not the ‘Orchard Pavilion’ but a gallery where a representation of ‘the Orchard Pavilion’ hangs. This trompe l’oeil effect is both striking and rigorous, briefly allowing us the sumptuous texture of art but denying us the fantasy of dwelling in it.

The borders of art and life are less concretely drawn elsewhere, and one gets the feeling that Pai would like life to resemble art, by means of cultural tradition or religious discipline. These themes underwrite the lovely ‘Cormorant Fishing,’ in which history, art history, lantern making and a fisherman’s unusual method all take turns holding the place of the represented and the real:

six fish pulled from one bird’s throat
ten from another; the evening catch yields
forty pounds of iridescent fish
scales, silver glow on board the boat deck
refracting light transmitted through paper
lanterns illuminating an inner world.

Is this vibrant scene iconography on a paper lantern? Or does the lantern light the ‘real’ scene? The poem opens: “Summer signified for 1,200 years/with the appearance of long boats/adrift along the Nagara River.” Is summer ‘signified’ in the context of art featuring the river, or on the actual river? Given this double context, is the fisherman’s work both life AND art, ‘signifying’ summer even as he plies his trade?

The book seems evenly split between a firm faith that life can hold the orderliness of art and the suspicion that it cannot, and this meditation takes the appropriately mundane form of prose poems. Most optimistic are the poems dealing with romantic love, as when, in ‘An Explanation of Magic,’ a man asks his lover to move his glass, thus accomplishing the ‘trick’ of telekenesis—moving the glass without touching it. More nuanced are those dealing with religious practice, Eastern and Western. Discipline and order break down as a priest slips on a rock during a Baptism, or when a speaker staffs a Buddhist dinner at the home of a socialite:

While searching for a place to store our coats, I open the door to the meditation room, a converted walk-in closet. The hostess sits before a thangka of the Buddha, cross-legged in meditation. The smell of sandalwood and sagebrush permeates the room. Jesus! she exclaims.

While Pai documents various figures’ failure to live up to the models of religion, she is rarely condemnatory, since these tender errors add to a less orderly but perhaps more sweetly designed world. And the speakers’ own conflict in observing these foibles adds further nuance to the poems; after the above-mentioned dinner, the guest of honor appears to the speaker in a dream: “He is stern with me, wagging his finger and shaking his head, warning, Do not speak poorly of your teachers.”

More often than not, Pai turns her attention to art itself, and in her appreciation of artists as diverse as Felix Gonzales-Torres and Mondrian she appears to find models for living more feasible, perhaps, than those offered by religion. In the poem “Equivalent,” based on an installation by Gonzales-Torres,

What you touch,
take
with you
a piece of hard green candy
pulled from a spill
on the gallery floor,
portrait of a friend
the qualities he gave those
he loved
transposed into sweet pile

In Pai’s figuration, the ‘transposition’ of the artist’s life into his work can next be ‘tranposed’ into the life of the viewer, especially the viewer who is herself an artist. The practice of art is thus the solution for living a life as elegant as the art object itself.

The most exciting poems in this ranging and committed book are those that apparently document and examine the development of Pai’s own sensibility. In “Color Study,” we see the first stirrings of a child’s sense of aesthetic inquiry: “She would[…] wonder why tomatoes corresponded to red when red had more in common with umbrellas.” This same speculative energy, in which the visual and verbal are coincident, is then shown to be at work in the adult artist: “She wanted more naturally occurring blue objects. She needed more imagination. She could name more than three if she counted eggplant and hypothermia.” Some of Pai’s poems are themselves works of visual or conceptual art—instructions for art handlers, poems with concrete elements, and, most delightfully, a series of scripts for DIY art:

Lift the blind of the bedroom window.
Place a clear glass bottle
on the window sill.
The painting exists when
the stars have risen.

These poems-as-art form a thrilling current through the volume, because they point up this poet-artist’s depth and potential. Her investigative energy, precise eye, and sense of aesthetic and ethical discipline presage a long career that will be fruitful not just for Pai but for the not-so-moribund state of American poetry.


Review of Equivalence by Barbara Jane Reyes (published in Tamafyhr Mountain Poetry)

Poet and visual artist Shin Yu Pai’s Equivalence is a lovely first book of poetry containing work inspired by the traditions, processes, and movements of visual arts. As a result, Pai’s poems are an experience, tactile and textured, as in “Recipe for Paper”:

Send legal briefs, failed attempts at love
letters and other confidential documents
through a shredder,

…

scoop handful of wet paper
into kitchen blender add
boiled daffodil stems,

mashed into a pulp, then blend
black tea leaves, garlic
or onion skin ….

Here appears to be something of Pai’s poetics; from both natural and constructed materials surrounding her, composing her world, her poems come. Engaged in active processes with these materials, Pai is acutely aware of their historical contexts. In the same poem, she explores the ancient settings, the Silk Road caravans ambushed and prisoners taken, in order to make precious paper, a thing we so easily take for granted in our modern lives.

And because her art arises from this visual and tactile world (here, we could use the term, “ekphrasis” to describe the writing of these poems), we come to understand that the poem and/or the painting, and the world the artist inhabits, are virtually inseparable, as in “Yes Yoko Ono”:

SHEEP PIECE

Borrow a herd of sheep,
one hundred in number or more
spray paint their fleece
with your favorite words.
Watch from a distance as the sheep
arrange themselves into poems.

And this is truly as it should be: the negation of space between the poem and the physical world which inspires it.

Knowing that objects can evoke powerful emotions, Pai’s imagery is sensual and delicious, as in “Heart-Shaped Box” (which is also the title of a Nirvana song; I’d like to think she had this in mind as she wrote this poem…):

I dream of you in another orbit
in museums where each
emptiness, every cavity
filled with cherry soda
and chocolate cake,
birds nesting in abandoned
dovecotes

And while reading the poems in Equivalence is a more than satisfying experience, I can’t help but wonder how much more full and exciting it would be, to surround myself with Pai’s work, in multiple media, in multiple dimensions. This is an experience to which I eagerly look forward.



Review of Equivalence by Jennifer Matthews.

Shin Yu Pai has a gift for punctuating the pristine "inner" of things. Her poems move, invoking images of blossoming; getting at the root of things, as if each word captures a perfect portrait, a mating of line to line. Her poems are wet with a beautiful lucidity--watering each fertile landscape with birth and inspiration. The rational meets the outer edges --almost falling, yet always caught in a sort of last minute deliverance.

In the poem " The Gathering at the Orchard Pavilion" Pai leads the reader through a myriad of beautifully rendered images of turquoise - speckled mountains, floating lotus pads flush with rice wine, to an innocent girl imparting wisdom on a wizened elder: " Where does the story begin?/ Father insists gently/ In the mountains, the girl cries/ Traces of handprints left on the glass/ It starts here she says/ Here."

Pai's gift to the reader is to invoke the connection we need to a greater consciousness that she quite obviously holds the key to.


Review of Unnecessary Roughness by Heather Nagami (reprinted from Galatea Resurrects)

Playful, technical, deadpan, grave, precise, dynamic, daring—these are all words that came to my mind while reading Shin Yu Pai’s chapbook, Unnecessary Roughness. From playground dodgeball to bodybuilding, Unnecessary Roughness is a unique exploration of how physical activities shape our roles in society, our senses of self, and our sexualities. A skilled poet and visual artist, Shin Yu Pai utilizes her creative faculties to their fullest.

What struck me in the opening pages of Unnecessary Roughness was Pai’s recognition of the book’s physicality—its own identity as a work on paper—not just ideas, but a self-conscious visual creation. The first two pages offer diagrams of two familiar sites: four square and dodge ball. Each is partially a diagram (four squares, a circle), and partially a written poem. The former conjures feelings of both familiarity and disorientation (i.e. “Yes, I remember this,” and “What, I’m in a poem?”) with the added benefit of Pai’s embellishments, which include two concentric circles in the dodge ball diagram, instead of just one, eerily resembling a bull’s-eye. The latter, the words on the diagram, are an interesting mix of familiar playground put-downs (e.g. “scaredycat” and “baby”) and the more obviously consequential “fag” and “pussy” (7). These are mappings of hierarchies, the origin of names, and the nature of childhood socialization.

Pai commands great precision over her words and also her word processing software. In “square it up,” words and phrases trickle down the page diagonally, backward, and forward, resembling trails where a child might have run during a four square game. As a four square alumnus myself, this all looked too familiar, until I read the text, “bobbling,” “chicken feet,” and “serving bitch,” which I only later found (through some research on Google) to actually be technical Four Square terminology (6). Did Pai remember these terms from grammar school? Or is she, too, a Google researcher? I had to wonder. However, no matter how she might answer, this alien language pointed to a community that was more complex and intricate than I knew. This feeling resonated with Pai’s remapping of my own childhood memories.

While Pai uses her word processor’s palette freely, she also demonstrates the limitations of such a palette. Exclamation marks separate the vertical lanes in a swimming pool diagram in the poem, “wet area.” Judging by the imprecise spacing, I do not think that Pai used tabs; so I imagined her typing something like this: exclamation point, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, exclamation point, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, two-character word, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, exclamation point. This is a hands-on, laborious piece that speaks to the boundaries created within a societal system that stunts and discourages personal growth and creativity.

In Unnecessary Roughness, Shin Yu Pai exposes the grim realities that await us under the guise of children’s games and sports. The three poems I have discussed represent only a small portion of what I found in this truly unique chapbook. Pai uses a full and diverse range of poetic devices that, along with the integrated visuals, demonstrates her devotion to the arts. This is the first piece I’ve read by Pai, and I’m hooked.