Fifty-four poems in verse and prose by New York writer John Yau, who has been called “the most important Chinese-American poet of our time” ( MultiCultural Review ). Yau has distinguished himself by his resistance to conventional discourse. This has taken Yau's work down some “startling thoroughfares,” as critic Edward Foster notes. “His ethnic background marks him as an outsider in America, but he is not interested in merely recording the terms of that exclusion. His work examines ways in which language has long been used, quite often subtly, to oppress and exclude.” Yau’s conducts us across wastes of “cities . . . fluttering with lost ghouls” to the place “inhibited shadows wait”. As one of his narrators say, “This, we tell ourselves, is the place where we must start.”