Book Launch | Chronicle of Drifting with Yuki Tanaka
Calling all drifters to celebrate Chronicle of Drifting, Yuki Tanaka’s debut poetry collection. Published this year with Copper Canyon Press, Chronicle of Drifting explores rootlessness, its beauty and perils. Drawing from Japanese literary traditions as well as by timeless surrealism, Tanaka creates a poignant dreamlike realm where the inner and outer worlds, the self and others, merge—like the train passenger who, looking out the window and seeing the sky through his reflection, feels “empty, a blue outline.”
Join Yuki for his New York book launch, featuring four guest readers: Stine An, Tianyi, Yesol Kim, and Shangyang Fang. Snacks provided. Drinks for sale. The event theme: wanderers. Optional dress code. Feel free to get a little surreal!
About the poet:
Yuki Tanaka was born and raised in Yamaguchi, Japan. He is the author of the poetry collection Chronicle of Drifting (Copper Canyon Press, 2025). He also co-translated, with Mary Jo Bang, A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi (Princeton University Press, 2024). He lives in Tokyo and teaches at Hosei University.
Guest Readers:
Stine An is a poet, translator, and performer in NYC whose work explores diasporic poetics, experimental translation, and virtual performance. Her poems and translations appear in Best Literary Translations 2024, Poem-a-Day, Poetry Daily, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. A 2024 NEA Translation Fellow, Stine is the author of S_MMER CR_SH (Sarabande Books, 2025) and the translator of Today’s Morning Vocabulary by Yoo Heekyung (Zephyr Press, 2025).
Tianyi is a poet based in New York, from Hong Kong. His creative and critical work can be found in Poetry Daily, New England Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Margins, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. He was a finalist for the New England Review's Award for Emerging Writers. In the fall, he will begin his MFA in Poetry at Columbia University where he will be a Max Ritvo Poetry Fellow.
Yesol Kim is a daughter of Korean immigrants. She lives and writes in New York.
方商羊 Shangyang Fang grew up in Chengdu, China. He is the author of Burying the Mountain.