A 2025 NATIONAL POETRY SERIES WINNER SELECTED BY SASHA ROQUE PIMENTEL
A collection of poems that explores questions of time, language, community, and selfhood through a contemporary Asian American lens.
DIARY heralds the arrival of a virtuosic new talent. Spanning the first five years of Yi Wei's twenties, it chronicles their attempt to write truth in the midst of grief, isolation, and upheaval. As Wei moves candidly through self-doubt, self-denial, and self-examination, we witness both a poet and a person in the making, only to find that they are always being made and unmade. The work is never done.
Through experimental techniques of grammatical and imagistic fragmentation, collage revision, footnoting, and formal ruptures, DIARY lays bare its political intent: to move beyond the gaze of power that places all experience into the neat history of the white, capitalist, patriarchal state.
Using the poetry of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha as their guide, Yi Wei opens an intimate window into interrogating how we re-enter ourselves and come to belong to the people we love, outside of the state, without the state.
