After almost three decades of publishing prose, canonical Chinese American author Maxine Hong Kingston embarks on the poetic life, a change of focus that, for Steven G. Yao, anticipates and possibly authorizes increased attention to poetry in Asian American literary studies. In Foreign Accents, Yao persuasively argues that such attention is long overdue for a form that was vital to Asian American political struggle, notably the formation of the Asian American movement in the late 1960s, and to Asian American literary production. For him, Asian American poetry's vast range of formal strategies serves “to register at the level of language itself the complex relationship among various linguistic and cultural traditions that have informed literary production by Asian Americans” (5). Yao rationalizes these formal strategies into three main “modes,” specifically “racial protest,” “lyric testimony” and “ethnic abstraction,” as represented in a selection of Asian American poetry “from exclusion to postethnicity” (10).

With the importance of poetry established, Yao goes on to historicize and theorize Asian American poetry with reference to hybridity theory or, more precisely, “a ‘new’ taxonomy of hybridization strategies” that brings together Chinese and American cultures and languages via “cross-fertilization,” “mimicry,” “grafting,” “transplantation” and “mutation” that exceed traditional hybridity theory as it is understood in ethnic studies and postcolonial studies by Lisa Lowe and Homi Bhabha respectively (22). Where Yao does find Bhabha and other postcolonial theorists, most notably Gayatri Spivak, more valuable is in their theorizations of poetics that enable insights into the production, and not simply the function, of different constructions of racial identity. Indeed, “by considering poetics not just as a set of … literary and rhetorical strategies of persuasion, but rather more significantly as identifying different forms of reasoning that circumvent the constraints of logic,” Yao proposes that “we can perhaps begin to shed new analytical light on the conceptual dynamics informing the process of racialization” (30, original emphases).

Foreign Accents is divided into two main sections, the first of which focusses on the rhetorical production of Chinese racial identity in the poetry of Ezra Pound (chapter 1) and in the verse of Cantonese-speaking immigrants detained on Angel Island (chapter 2). Also in this first section is an interchapter, entitled “From the Language of Race to the Poetics of Ethnicity: The Rise of American Verse” up until the formation of the Asian American movement in the late 1960s (95). Although very different in terms of form and language, Pound's Cathay and the Angel Island poems challenge American nativist racism, as articulated in the Yellow Peril stereotype and the exclusionist immigration regime.

The second section of Foreign Accents focusses on contemporary Chinese American poetry, beginning with Ha Jin (chapter 3), who, like his “co-ethnic predecessors,” the Angel Island poets, promotes a “poetics of specifically Chinese cultural identity partly as a result of and in traumatized response to the experiences of immigration to the United States” (112). By focussing on these immigrant poets, Yao highlights the need to expand the category “Asian American” to include transnational and transpacific perspectives. The remaining chapters analyze Yao's three poetic “modes” in the context of three poets more readily associated with Asian American poetry: Li-Young Lee's testimonial poetry (chapter 4), Marilyn Chin's activist poetry (chapter 5) and John Yau's nonrepresentational poetic treatment of “questions of ethnicity in an abstract fashion that nevertheless constitutes a significant form of ethnic cultural production” (37) (chapter 6). Yao concludes his meticulously researched and thought-provoking book with a consideration of the increasingly relevant role he hopes “Chinese/American” verse will play in the contemporary period of liberal multiculturalism in which President Obama synecdochically signifies America's supposedly “postracial” and “postethnic” future.

Scholars in Asian/American literary studies will find Foreign Accents invaluable – this short review hardly does it justice, especially since it is the sort of book that will reveal fresh insights time and time again.