for now I am sitting here growing transparent - Yau Ching;Chenxin Jiang

"Exemplifying how Yau uses softness and vulnerability in the stead of impassioned critique, readers are likely to find themselves entranced by these poems, their fiercely gentle existence outside of social hierarchy... Translated from Chinese, For now I am sitting here growing transparent is Yau’s fifteenth book, and her first to be translated into English. Gathering work from Yau’s other collections, this text is a kind of mid-career retrospective, making Yau’s work accessible to English-speaking audiences while also curating the most resonant and crafted poems from her corpus... Delicately understated yet full of Yau’s queer and feminist politics, this compilation is both ideologically and formally explorative, refusing to fall into the neat category of confessional poetry-or conversely, of explicitly political content... this collection sees its poet eventually arriving at a kind of self-assured openness, a universe in which she can be both confessional and declamatory. Thus, For now I am sitting here growing transparent is not solely a detached work of art for art’s sake, but a radically prefigurative text intertwined with social movements and communities of care, creating a world without dichotomies between softness and strength." mk zariel, Asymptote Journal

"These are poems of atmosphere, that invite you to walk inside them and inhabit their worldview, seeing the world from a blade-like angle. In the windtunnel of dominant languages, Yau Ching pushes back through the guerilla language of her own: poetry... Disenfranchised by colonial cat and mouse, these poems play their own games with reality, inviting us into a world where ’only getting lost is permanent’, and - in the absence of social infrastructure - Poetry steps into the void to talk back to reckless capital. Updating Surrealism for the era of swiping, steaks become metaphors for love and cinemas become the spaces where truth might be found. Pick up the book and enter the dreamscape. In the realism of shadowplay, where identities merge in the shadows and voices seem louder in the dark, disappearing into transparency never felt so real." Chris McCabe, National Poetry Librarian, UK