Breaking into Blossom is a gift for all warm-hearted, romantic readers who love to revel in rich and beautiful imagery. Sit back and enjoy, especially in the sometimes changeable Canadian weather (I first read this book during the snowstorms of this past spring). And it’s a collection of caring – of joy and delight, family and community, and thoughtful prayers for those lost and alone.
The 90-page tome covers a wide range of topics and tones. Starting with the glories and symbolism of flowers in such poems as “Queen Anne’s Lace” and “Honeysuckles and Ladders”, she moves into a wider space through such poems as “Monkey King”, “Interviewing Yan Li”, “Umpires’ Game”, “Chichen Itza Tour”, and ”Bruegel’s Two Monkeys”. Further on, the theme poem “Breaking into Blossom” records her own blossoming into her full self. Expanding into a wider world, “The Rare Abalone”, “A Pair of Yellowstone Mugs”, “Girl as Red Pepper” and “Visiting Flowerpot Island” lead to a musing on trees as symbols – “The Life Tree”, “Spirit Tree”, “The Hollow Tree”,
“Some Trees Come to Me” – and a bit of whimsy in “I Too Bite the Juicy Fruit of Poetry 79”. Throughout, the importance of family and friendship is always present. The collection winds to a close with sharp insights into love and meaning in the poems “Unclaimed”, “Pears”, “Dearly” and “Truth”.
Yin’s poetic voice draws inspiration from multiple quoted sources, literary, musical, mythical, and philosophical. One of the intriguing aspects of the collection is her poems to and about Chinese, Iranian, and other international and historical figures. Sources include Arthur Sze, Yan Li, Bänoo Zan, the myth of Nuwa, George Orwell, Qu Yuan, Joseph Brodsky, Priscilla Upall, James Rold, TS Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Billy Collins, John Ashbery, Rilke, Leonard Cohen, and Wallace Stevens. Within this context, her poems ring a bell particularly for their insights into life in Canada as part of the Asian community – and as a cherisher of beloved family. Her personal reflections on life and family are deep and touching, sometimes quite sad but also rejoicing.
Anna Yin’s work has gained widening recognition. Writing and translating poetry in both Chinese and English, Yin has published extensively in the decade and half since her first English book-length publication, Wings Toward Sunlight (Mosaic Press 2011). This was followed by seven English collections before the current one, the Chinese collection Drifting in 2024, and translations into Chinese for Canadian poets Katherine L. Gordon, DC Reid, and Don Gutteridge. She was Mississauga’s first Poet Laureate (2015- 2017), and the Ontario representative to the League of Canadian Poets (2013-2016). Her poetry awards include the 2005 Ted Plantos Memorial
Award. Her poems and translations have appeared in Queen’s Quarterly, ARC Poetry, The New York Times, China Daily, and on CBC Radio. She has read her work on Parliament Hill, at the Austin International Poetry Festival, at the Edmonton Poetry Festival and at universities in China, Canada and the United States. Breaking into Blossom is an excellent introduction to a poet of breadth and insight.
– Susan McMaster, 2025/04/30
Susan McMaster’s 40-plus publications include poetry books, recently Grounded (Black Moss 2023), recordings, and anthologies. She has served as president of the League of Canadian poets and chair of its Feminist Caucus. Her midlife memoir, The Gargoyle’s Left Ear, recounts founding Branching Out, a first Canadian feminist/arts magazine; writing and performing word/music with First Draft, SugarBeat, and Geode Music & Poetry across Canada and on shows including Morningside, As It Happens, and Richardson’s Roundup; editing such collections as Siolence: Poets on Women, Violence and Silence; and organizing projects including “Convergence: Poems for Peace”, which brought art-wrapped poetry from across the country to all MPs and Senators in the millennial year.
From Richard Greene:
Here is a poet who finds authority in endurance. With a deepening craft, Anna Yin confronts bereavement, repression, displacement, and the complexities of love in poems that are heartfelt and crystalline.
From Alice Major:
Anna Yin’s poems ‘breathe in two languages,’ creating a lovely tension between immediacy and distance that feels as though two points on a globe have been connected by a flight path. Her imagery is deeply sensual, compelling yet delicate. Her lines hover in our minds like the dream that “finds his own key, unlocks the door and comes inside.”
From Molly Peacock:
In her gorgeous book, Breaking into Blossom, Anna Yin’s poetry is like the interior of the abalone shell she depicts, “emerald… just shining.” Almost anything or anyone in this volume can break unexpectedly into blossom, including the poems themselves, often concluding with unanticipated discoveries. The book undulates with observations and the animated sur-reality of all kinds of exchanges, from an interview with a painter to the poet’s father’s late life words to a desperate woman stepping on a Forget-me-not. “The career of flowers differs from us only in inaudibleness,” Emily Dickinson wrote to her cousins, and Yin’s buoyant inspirations from poets across time, Li Po to Wallace Stevens, Akhmatova to Dickinson herself, give voice to subtly noticed feelings and thoughts. Anna Yin is fast becoming a Canadian treasure.
