Perennial Counterpart

If Chen will have to keep writing forever to avoid dissonance between their present and written selves, in Perennial Counterpart they embrace writing’s permanence, pinning down what does feel true, minute as it may be. While wrestling with transience, Chen’s words do not merely pass over the reader—they are meant to stick.

Perennial Counterpart, Chen’s debut from Nightboat Books, considers how two people—a reader and a poet, or a poet and their influences—can be held in relation without possession.

Literary criticism, lyric inquiry, and the poetics of friendship come together to create this queer poetry collection.

Chen’s poems have a relaxed pace, a compliance. . . . It’s like in a canoe, when you pull the water in one direction, and the water fills into that space. That turbulent activity as the water seeks its equilibrium, that is the consistency and presence of Chen’s poems.

Chen’s poems thread across meditative distances, both cinematic and philosophical, and writing on obsession and creative acts, gesture and gratitude, human connection and travel.

Sculptural, philosophical. . . . [Perennial Counterpart] forms constellations, their meanings growing in scope as they cross and connect in other poems. I’ll be re-reading this book for a long time.

Yongyu Chen’s debut poem collection Perennial Counterpart, which explores themes of “memory, nostalgia, and identity,” might be the perfect read for our reflective time.