Contemporary Authors

• Prayer Book of the Anxious Elixir Press (Denver, CO), 2016

• Elixir Press - http://elixirpress.com/featured-author/2017/6/12/josephine-yu-prayer-book-of-the-anxious

  Josephine Yu is the author of Prayer Book of the Anxious, winner of the Judge’s Prize of the 15th Annual Elixir Press Poetry Awards. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Ploughshares, The Southern Review, TriQuarterly, and Crab Orchard Review, as well as the anthology Old Flame: From the First 10 Years of 32 Poems Magazine. Mark Strand selected her work for inclusion in Best New Poets 2008. Thrice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, she won the Ploughshares 2013 Emerging Writers Contest, Meridian’s 2010 Editor’s Prize, the New Letters 2010 Poetry Award, and the New Letters 2010–2011 Readers Award for Poetry.

  Josephine grew up in Atlanta, where she earned her BA and MFA from Georgia State University. She and her husband, Royal, moved to Tallahassee in 2007, so she could pursue her PhD at Florida State University. Josephine joined the faculty of Keiser University in 2012. She volunteers at Big Bend Hospice and teaches continuing education classes on a variety of topics, including poetry and feminist theory, for Leon County Senior Outreach and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. Josephine’s newest passion is officiating weddings.

• Josephine Yu - https://josephineyupoet.com/about/

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  HomeAbout
  Josephine Yu is the author of Prayer Book of the Anxious (Elixir P, 2016), winner the Judge’s Prize of the 15th Annual Elixir Press Poetry Awards. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Ploughshares, The Southern Review, TriQuarterly, and Crab Orchard Review, as well as the anthology Old Flame: From the First 10 Years of 32 Poems Magazine. Mark Strand selected her work for inclusion in Best New Poets 2008. Thrice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, she won the Ploughshares 2013 Emerging Writers Contest, Meridian’s 2010 Editor’s Prize, the New Letters 2010 Poetry Award, and the New Letters 2010–2011 Readers Award for Poetry.

  Josephine grew up in Atlanta, where she earned her BA and MFA from Georgia State University. She and her husband, Royal, moved to Tallahassee in 2007, so she could pursue her PhD at Florida State University. Josephine joined the faculty of Keiser University in 2012. She volunteers at Big Bend Hospice and teaches continuing education classes on a variety of topics, including poetry and feminist theory, for Leon County Senior Outreach and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. Josephine’s newest passion is officiating weddings.

  Still curious?

  • In “True Confessions of a Lifelong Learner,” OLLI student and past president Fran Conaway describes Josephine’s class on feminist theory and romance novels.

  • In “Prayers, Postcards, and Poetry: How Josephine Yu Rewrites Religion and Refigures the Southern Woman,” Laci Mattison discusses religion and gender in Prayer Book of the Anxious.

The Prayer Book of the Anxious
Publishers Weekly.
263.38 (Sept. 19, 2016): p48.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
* The Prayer Book of the Anxious
Josephine Yu. Elixir (SPD, dist.), $17 trade paper (96p) ISBN 978-1-932418-58-3
Yu cheekily tap-dances across the line between self-help and religious texts in her excellent debut collection. She translates the complexities of
relationships into fables; domestic objects become symbols imbued with a magic that is more blasphemous than mystical: "Lead us not/ into the
temptation of sublets or studio walk-ups/ that get good afternoon light in our imagination." Her speaker is often in conflict with religious tenets
but reclaims their language and structures to make sense of contemporary life. Both bawdy and reverent, tender and frustrated, Yu's poems, which
are often humorously titled, maintain a curiosity that is almost rapturous--a questioning always followed by the infectious satisfaction of solving
the puzzle. "If this is a fable, what is the moral? What animal am I? What glass jar will fill with rain, raising what berry within my reach?" The
poems never become didactic, and the permutations that Yu's statements and queries take often feel like they're surprising to her. Moreover,
because even searing tragedies are greeted with tongue planted in cheek, subjects such as mental illness and divorce become approachable and
navigable. With a perceptiveness and poise that serve as a curative balm, Yu brilliantly tackles the notion of healing in a society that can make its
most aware citizens ill. (Oct.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Prayer Book of the Anxious." Publishers Weekly, 19 Sept. 2016, p. 48. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA464352705&it=r&asid=46ba94660d963f143a4b21c6c8005d5c. Accessed 23 June
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A464352705

• Tupelo Quarterly
  http://www.tupeloquarterly.com/prayerbookoftheanxious/
  Word count: 1114

  Prayer Book of the Anxious by Josephine Yu
  This entry was posted in Reviews and tagged Josephine Yu Marcene Gandolfo on November 28, 2016 by Kristina Marie Darling
  prayer-book-coverIn her stellar debut collection, Prayer Book of the Anxious, Josephine Yu includes poems that illustrate faith in human empathy and community. As the title suggests, Yu’s poems read like prayers. They derive rhythms, syntax, and language from the Roman Catholic missal, the incantations of Sunday mass. In a sense, they remain Catholic in their generous universality and attention to ritual. Yet the poems resist traditional religious readings. Yu’s poems celebrate the holiness in human imperfection and the need for connection.

  Early in the collection, Yu’s gripping poem, “A Myth of the Palm-Leaf Manuscript,” establishes a tone for the book. Yu’s inclusive discourse and imperative syntax invite us to participate in the poem’s composition, to take an active part in its construction: “Remember the woman who told you she found a dead cat on her deck, fur matted with August rain, how her husband nudged it onto cardboard with his loafer and dropped it over the fence into the neighbor’s azaleas? Make her you, you ten, her husband your father, before the divorce.”

  As Yu directs us to substitute words as variables in the narrative, as we “make the cat a mole” . . . [m]ake August February, the shoe a shovel,” as we “let the shovel crack the frozen fur,” the man in the poem becomes more violent, the story grows more brutal. In the end, the speaker seeks understanding in the language of myth: “This is the story the elders will tell when the wheat withers on the stalk and the first-born swallow their tongues, the story they’ll repeat when the cattle fall like trees and the trees fall like drunkards: this, the myth of the god of despair, who is the father of the god of attention.”

  The poem addresses the influence of memory on story and language, assimilating the narrative of the other with the narrative of the self. Memory creates meaning, which, in turn, constructs mythology. This theme continues throughout the book. Yu’s poems place the saints in communion with the misfits, the marginalized, and the poems encourage us to locate ourselves in the congregation of eccentrics. We may find pieces of our own stories in those of the lepidopterist who lives alone, the fortuneteller who knows she will never marry, and the manic-depressive who wins the Nobel Prize for getting it on.

  In many ways, Yu’s poems celebrate our communion, not with saints, but with humanity, in those qualities, which may be perceived as imperfections; the poems suggest that we establish connection through our challenges, frailties, and adversities. This is clear in “Veneration of the Anxious,” as the poem calls us into community.

  If grief is a motel where we each wait
  alone in a room, listening
  to the pillowcase seams unravel,

  surely worry is a cathedral
  where we congregate to practice
  the sacred rites: biting of nails
  and the picking of the newest scab
  or smallest ragged edge of skin.

  Here worry is not a sign of weakness; it is a common thread to which humanity is tethered. And the poem not only acknowledges the anxious, it recognizes them with deep respect. Yu’s speaker challenges us against stigmatizing the anxious, against clinging to negative associations and preconceived judgments. Likewise, she suggests the anxious deserve veneration because they pay attention and exhibit concern. As the speaker identifies herself with the community of anxious, she invites us to enter the cathedral, to face and accept our worries, and to share them as part of a larger human consciousness:

  We come to be consecrated
  in dizziness, nausea, insomnia,
  ecstatic to hear the chorus of heartbeats,
  those hymns racing.

  Yu’s poems find holiness, not in the heavenly, but in the earthly, the fleshly, the human. Even error is sacred. In “Plea of the Penitent,” Yu satirically plays on the traditional prayer of contrition.

  We’re best-selling authors of grave mistakes.
  Our advance is regret, six figures, but never enough
  for a down payment on restraint. We’re sincere as hell, though,
  when we apologize, pleading into the disconnect tone
  or mouthing the rosary after confession, even as we plot
  what we can write next on this blank slate.

  Give us this day our daily second chance. Let us atone like the Hindus
  who lift curses by marrying strays draped in yellow saris
  and garlands of jasmines and orchids. Take us to the pound
  in Leon County, to the gravel runs in the back.
  Show us the arthritic husky or tumored retriever, the one shivering
  with anticipation for the long car ride home.

  Playing on traditional Catholic guilt and sinners’ words of self-depreciation, Yu advocates that our signature temptations and mistakes bring us into the larger circle of humanity. Our tendency to error, fail, and fall short of expectations, provides us with common ground for new endeavors. Yu’s poems create contexts that consecrate preconceived earthly imperfections.

  Rooted in the conventions of prayer, these poems speak in physical rituals as well as those that employ language. For Yu, the holiest rituals are often the most commonplace rites, embedded in the domestic services of daily life. In “How Do You Say,” Yu explores the relationship between language and love:

  . . . not all languages of love are actual languages,
  not French, as you might expect, mon amour,
  or Italian, Ti amo, vita mia, but the language of sweeping

  the garage without being asked or necking at the movies
  or scooping out the litter box,
  so the broom’s metronome counts the beat of love . . .

  The poem suggests that love is best expressed in simple acts of affection, generosity, sacrifice; it rejects the notion that love’s language should be elaborate or overly romanticized. These modest rituals, often overlooked, constitute the most sacred acts of humility.

  In Prayer Book of the Anxious, Josephine Yu explores the tenacity of the human spirit, in all its quirkiness and fallibility. Her poems reveal holiness in paying attention to the earthly and human rather than the heavenly and angelic. These poems revel in human empathy and desire for community. They celebrate inclusivity as they reside in the space between the self and the other.

• Break Water Review
  http://www.breakwaterreview.com/single-post/2017/01/18/Review-Josephine-Yus-Prayer-Book-of-the-Anxious
  Word count: 910

  Review: Josephine Yu's Prayer Book of the Anxious
  Faith in Chaos: A review of Josephine Yu’s Prayer Book of the Anxious

  Josephine Yu’s Prayer Book for the Anxious rests on a sense of brokenness: the foothold of many of its shimmering poems involves a kind of wonderful and irreparable shattering. Encountering Yu’s work is like walking into an old church to find an iconoclast undertaking a mosaic project. You’re never granted solid ground: only continuous, exquisitely executed unease carried forward from poem to poem by enormous talent and energy. This is a swift, deft little collection that crackles with titles like “A Vindictive Son of a Bitch of a Poem” and “Narcissist Revises Tidal Theory.” You can’t escape the discomfort that comes with this collection, or its strange and energetic humor.

  Sometimes, the kind of brokenness that the poems present us is not visual brokenness, but a more subtle and exquisite sense of falling out of place, as if the speaker is themself the broken element in the equation, as in “Manic Depressive Visits Ocean with Lover One Last Time”:

  “She finds that it’s not what she remembered, the sand coarser, / wind brittle, more insistent. / Even the current has changed directions, and she’s lost / in the one-way streets of a city she was sure she knew.”

  Later in the poem, there are “scraping fragments of seashells and the broken finger of a starfish,” tangible details rife with shards and splinters, but the pervading sense of brokenness here isn’t that violent imagery of “the broken finger of a starfish.” Something much deeper in the infrastructure is unsettled. The speaker reaches for a reliable certainty, a reliable memory, and finds both absent. The one-way streets baffle her, even though they should be familiar. Where there should be solid ground, a place for identity and relationships to have an anchor, a definite spot to return to, we find the world of Yu’s poems is too fluid and too shattered to offer us such easy reassurances.

  There’s a genuine sense of devotion in this Prayer Book too, but devotion to what it’s hard to say. What I feel most clearly is a wonderfully articulated sense, forfeiting any desperation to anchor oneself in certainty, of adhering instead to randomness, to a sense of being disjointed. The desperation for security doesn’t go away though; it only has to be repeatedly rejected. There is a deep desperation in the poems’ anxiety: to settle, to hold on, to sink roots in, and to have the certainty of a fixed path. But even as this urge comes through, the poems deconstruct even the smallest, personal certainties. Yu documents the end of a relationship, a childhood recollection layered with mud and silver light, and prayers to the sainted figures who dot its pages. All of these narratives are undermined and complicated individually, speculated into needle-bright details that ultimately leave us with a cracked, unmoored sense of their respective stories.

  In “Prayer to St. Joseph: For the Restless,” Yu writes, “Still our hands as we pack. Remind us the roughest fabric / of the self will end up folded like a sweater / in the suitcase, pilled and raveled and transcendent.” She presents not a simple coming-to-terms with what unsettles us, but rather a decision to move with the currents around us, to allow ourselves to be as unsettled as we need to be.

  One unconquerable aspect of this collection, though, is its sense of optimism. The book as a whole has the feeling of a prayer, of looking intently forward despite the smashed-mosaic effect of brokenness and fragmentation already haunting the work. What Yu accomplishes in Prayer Book of the Anxious is a tense, forward-leaning expectancy, a refusal to be buried in chaos but rather to understand the world by allowing its randomness and its damages to show through unapologetically. Rather than looking to simplify, to glue all the pieces back together in a coherent order, we find instead a faith in chaos.

  In Prayer Book of the Anxious, Yu pulls off a tricky balancing act in such a small collection: to give her readers a disordered, many-fragmented view of the world through very anxious eyes, and to teach us how to live within that fragmentation.

  These are not comfortable poems: they don’t give the impression of solid ground to walk on, or a clear sense that there is security to return to, after the anxious moment of the poem has passed. Rather, the poems’ spark comes from an impressive array of small battles—with self, with place, with memory—as these battles pile up, one on top of another, from poem to poem. There isn’t victory in sight, but as we find in Yu’s poems, we shouldn’t hold our breath for that kind of sanctuary. We can only take stock of the tide and keep moving forward.
  Alison Lanier is an MFA candidate at University of Massachusetts Boston, a member of the Writers' Room of Boston, and a founding editor of Mortar Magazine. She also serves as an editor at Critical Flame and as an editorial assistant at AGNI, and previously at Counterpoint and The Wellesley Review. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared at Atticus Review, The Establishment, Burningword, Origins, and elsewhere.