Diary of Small Discontents

John Yau is a poet, art critic, fiction writer, and publisher whose recent books include Tell it Slant, Genghis Chan on Drums, and Please Wait by the Coat Room: Reconsidering Race and Identity in American Art. He founded Black Square Editions and cofounded the online magazine Hyperallergic Weekend. He has received awards and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment of the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets, among others. He is professor emeritus at Rutgers University and lives in Beacon, New York.

"Across the amazing & ever-changing arc of Yau’s poetry, the range of possibility, steeped in sound, image, story’s insistent edges, every formal variation available, and something like total word love, is vast and exact. . . . In Yau’s poems the sense—my sense—of presence is always multiple, amused amidst difficult questions, and unremitting. Consciousness comes forward to recede and reform again, changed by experience and attraction. Emotive tones may be inseparable from personae: voices in their various costumes listened to in chaotic order to try on, channeled from an endless stream of vessels, i.e. the mournful necessities of respect and need, rich with humor so as to continue. Diary of Small Discontents, a half century-long picture-wild adventure, is a major gift to anyone capable of loving poetry."