Tell it Slant - John Yau - Bog

"Emily Dickinson begins one of her best-known poems with the oft-quoted line, "Tell all the truth but tell it slant -" For anyone who is Asian American, the word "slant" can be heard and read two ways. It is this sense of doubleness - culminating in the instability of language and an untrustworthy narrator - that shapes, informs, and inflects the poems, all of which focus on the question of who is speaking and who is being spoken for and to? Made up of eight sections, each of which explores the idea of address - as place, as person, as memory, and as event - Tell It Slant does as Dickinson commands, but with a further twist. Among the summoned spirits who help the author "tell all the truth," the reader will hear reimagined traces of poets, movie stars, and science fiction writers - including Charles Baudelaire, Thomas de Quincey, Philip K. Dick, Li Shangyin, and Elsa Lanchester - among the multitudes contained"--