A diverse and cacophonous poetry collection tackling subjects from
identity to current events.
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. Employing various forms, John Yau's
poems traverse a range of 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. Yau moves effortlessly from using the rhyme scheme of a
sixteenth-century Edmund Spenser sonnet to riffing on a well-known
poem-rant by the English poet Sean Bonney, and to immersing himself in
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 unsavory voices strive to be heard.
