A Poetry Book Society Spring 2019 Recommendation. In Discipline, her third collection, Jane Yeh depicts a haunting and hilarious variety of lives, from an endangered young rhinoceros to the denizens of the 1980s New York club scene. These multifaceted poems explore what identity isn’t and is, as performance, as struggle, as change, as art, with penetrating wit, channeling the voices of outsiders, artists, misfits, and others. Discipline inhabits the space between the real and the surreal, a mash-up of deadpan humour and heartbreaking imagery where novelty T-shirts and lady astronaut centaurs can coexist. The poems are triggered by videos, paintings and installations by contemporary artists, animals and city life. They bristle with striking details and observations. Imaginary landscapes converge with episodes from recent history: power, resistance and the structures of oppression are seen inexorably in operation. These miniature dramas perform their own autopsies: `Sweet, then sour. My lips the colour of Doubt’.

Prizes

Commended for Poetry Book Society Recommendation 2019

'Discipline' offers an array of dark humour and electric wit...Yeh exposes the vanity of our emotional weight. The result is liberating and, yes, deeply funny.'
Sandeep Parmar, PBS Spring Bulletin 2019

'Like the paintings of Kirsten Glass that inspire Discipline's title poem, Yeh shows that the elegant and the macabre are never far apart.'
Ben Wilkinson, The Guardian

'"Haunting and hilarious" explorations of identity and performance prompted by videos and paintings, animals and street life.'
The Guardian - '2019 in books: what you'll be reading this year'

'Across her collections, Yeh affords much time and empathy...in sketching these ostensibly comic figures with idiosyncrasies and surprising expressions of fears, desires or dreams they come far closer to the reader than their technicolour exteriors might suggest...What stands out most for me about Yeh's work is its generosity, or rather its un-self-centredness. It takes a serious openness of heart to be so willing to appear so ludicrous, to so consistently prioritise the playful and culturally communal, to keep, as she demands of the poets she critiques herself, the time, energy and experience of reader to the fore of one's aesthetics.'
Dave Coates, Dave Poems

'Every word, image and space is arranged just so, and you can almost detect the hand of the poet making the final tweak'
Edwina Attlee, The Poetry Review, Summer 2019

'Humour and linguistic dynamism, mainstream and counterculture, brush up against each other in Yeh's poetry'
Rob A. Mackenzie, Magma

'Such poems capture the universality of loneliness, the daily negotiations we make with our given bodily 'identities', and our desire to connect with other living beings, imperfect as those connections may be'
Kathryn Maris, Times Literary Supplement

'Yeh is a poet of imaginative transformation who creates worlds that borrow from art, fashion, the internet, and pop culture [...] this is an impressive book that I hope will be influential and widely read. Continual surprises, when coupled with the compression of her best poems, are why Discipline reads so well. Yeh's mastery of this tension rewards rereading over and over. Like a child at the bottom of a slide, I found myself wanting to start again as soon as I'd finished.'
Matthew Valades, Quarterly West

'Density and nuance dancing together in precise flights of the imagination are the hallmarks of Yeh's poetry.' John Yau, Hyperallergic Books of the Year 2020

'Yeh's use of irony and the surreal is always, at its best, counterbalanced with emotional weight. Like Chelsey Minnis, she uses the interplay of imagery to upset and interrogate cultural hierarchies. The virtuoso, often slapstick, performance of these poems doesn't belie the seriousness, or the razor-sharp vision, of this collection.'
Kate Potts, Poetry London

'Yeh pulls back the lens of aestheticised perfection to show the world as it really stands. Each time we think we have a handle of Yeh's poems, and expectation of what they might do, she wrong-foots us; so we must begin again, and join her in interrogating patriarchal and elitist notions of what poetry is, what it can do, and what it should include.'
Jenna Clarke, The Compass

Jane Yeh was born in America and has lived in London since 2002. She holds degrees in English and Creative Writing from Harvard, Iowa, Manchester Metropolitan, and Royal Holloway London universities. Her first collection of poems, Marabou (Carcanet, 2005), was shortlisted for the Whitbread, Forward, and Aldeburgh poetry prizes. She was named a Next Generation poet by the Poetry Book Society for her second collection, The Ninjas (Carcanet, 2012). A Lecturer in Creative Writing at the Open University, she also writes on books, theatre, and fashion for such publications as The Poetry Review and The Village Voice.