"[Yang] tries to find forms tight enough to seem original, but loose enough to encompass the horrors of our still recent past; his attempts are leavened, and brightened, by a moving family elegy set in East Asia and by the scenes and moments in which Yang seems to see just where he stands." –Publishers Weekly
"Here is a first book written from a very high floor of the Tower of Babel, and the view is exhilarating. Not since D. H. Lawrence's Birds, Beasts and Flowers! or the bestiary written by Kenneth Rexroth for his daughters has a poet wrung so much human meaning from the natural world." –Karl Kirchwey, The New York Times Book Review on An Aquarium
"The quickness with which this poet can shift among eras of human history, civilizations, and languages is graceful, exhilarating, dizzying." –from the citation for the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry on An Aquarium
"Yang's debut is as full of surprises as it is full of fish. . . . Those who read the collection quickly may find it witty but gimmicky; those who bring more attention will take more away from this rare first book that combines a simple theme (poems as sea life, the book as their tank) with clear, sharp thought at the level of sentence and line." –Publishers Weekly on An Aquarium
