The Yellowing Roots of Not (Bilingual)

Bilingual edition of The Yellowing Roots of Not, translated by the author herself. 

Note: Night Talks I from the monolingual version has been replaced with (Untitled/she said).

Author: Yě Yě

Translator: Yě Yě

Typeset & Design: Yuan

Booklet, 52 pp, 7.9 x 5.57 in Language: English / Chinese / French Release Date: 15 February, 2026

Yě Yě is a poet and translator. She has authored two poetry collections. Her poems and translations have appeared in AGNI, TRIPWIRE, SNOW lit rev, Oxford Poetry, Modern Poetry in Translation, theHythe, Pamenar Press, PEN America, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of 2026 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for her translation of Jike Ayou's work.

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The Yellowing Roots of Not is a gorgeous and fiercely wild book. It would not have needed to namecheck Alejandra Pizarnik for me to think of her: both she and Yě Yě break and remake language in the most emotionally intense ways—in ways that emerge from an experience of loneliness and displacement, "as if a plant has been rooted out of the soil it belongs to.” Severed from stability, Yě reenacts this severing in language:"a pail of seasons drowned to live"; "All we have left is blank stares" that "glide across our empty chests, like / a school of homeless swallows"; the "paper...bleeding itself blind." This is a book that can be read quickly for these unlexicalized intensities, but read it slowly and many other things emerge: "[T]here's no way to lid it.” I will keep this book on my most sacred shelf.   

                         —David Gorin, author of To a Distant Country, editor of The Constant Critic and winner of 2023 Emily Dickinson Award