“The Ninth Island somehow yearns as it collects. It collects human wreckage and the communally idiosyncratic while moving between the shine of diamonds and the grit of dust. Tussle, please, the poems whisper to each other. Andrew Chi Keong Yim has made an explosion that thankfully explodes in slow motion, from the top down. Absolutely dope as bookmaking gets.”
—Kiese Laymon, author of Good, God
“To read The Ninth Island is to witness an archipelago in the making: community belonging and family love linking islands across time and space, while nodding to the ironic connections between Hawaiʻi and Las Vegas. Yim writes with island intimacy, grief, humor. Each poem, a topography of longing—a rendering of people and places that become home, a map carried.”
—Brandy Nālani McDougall, Hawaiʻi Poet Laureate (2023-2025) and author of ʻĀina Hānau / Birth Land
“Andrew Chi Keong Yim’s debut is a deeply soulful and searing interrogation of place, personhood, and belonging. With poems that range from hilarious to heartbreaking to stunningly poignant, The Ninth Island is a worthy introduction to a new poet that may well help define his generation’s lyric conscious. In a time where questions of borders, citizenship, and displacement animate our discourse at every level from local to international, what a gift to have a poet with such a necessary song on these subjects. Yim’s poems take up multiple intersecting questions of belonging in the colonial space of Hawaiʻi and well beyond those shores. Yim reminds us just how unsettled our present is and just how close the complicated past is to our fingertips.”
—Nate Marshall, author of Finna and Something Blue
Press
02.09.2027
University of Pittsburgh Press
