Sightings

Leslie Scalapino

Poet and Publisher

In Sightings, Shin Yu Pai disrupts voyeurism by an increasingly disruptive text. The dazzling effect of these dismembered texts, which range from an eye test to a play in verse composed from phrases from a Chinese-English phrase book, is akin to exquisite corpses, texts that are sexual, unconscious, and social hybrids that are not characterizations of culture, western society or imperialism.

Kevin Killian

Poet and Playwright

Shin Yu Pai’s poems explode in a hundred urgent directions, with the incandescence of fireworks. Her book delves deep into modernist experiment, and draws back not out of fear nor from a respect for convention but only when the human imperative to communicate might otherwise be cut short. She is a young artist, of an age when a volume of selected poems might seem egregious, but in this case it is fascinating to watch, in Sightings, the dyer s own hand judge, then set aside for us, the best of her amazing production.

Denise Duhamel

Poet

The physicality of the work and her stunning visual experimentations originate from the body. Shin Yu Pai uses charts, diagrams and non-literary forms of all sorts, to poetically gauge the complexities of race and gender. Sightings: Selected Works is a gorgeous and brilliant collection.