Jess Yuan

Slow Render

Teeming with maps and histories, journeys and landscapes, Jess Yuan’s collection weaves together worlds with tender and incisive lyricism. Told in three parts, this book unveils as it journeys, slowly rendering into landscapes of childhood warped by memory. These poems wrestle with images of spatial order and disorder within the city, the planet, the home, and the body. From expansive world building sequences to the tight interiority of room sized sonnets, Yuan’s poems interrogate how our environments are imagined, constructed, represented, and lived in. With piercing and visceral language, Slow Render sings of longing and belonging in this stunning, unique collection.

Cover design: Beth Ford
ISBN: 978-1-950404-13-1
Paperback: $18
Publication date: April 2024

Jess Yuan is a poet, educator, and architect. She is author of the chapbook Threshold Amnesia (Yemassee 2020) and has been supported by Kundiman, Miami Writers Institute, and the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. Her poems appear in Best New Poets, Tupelo Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. Born in California to Chinese immigrants, Jess is based in Boston and Baltimore with her spouse.  

Praise for Slow Render

“To render—that is, to build up or cause to become a more unfortunate state—is the operating motion of Jess Yuan’s Slow Render, a deep and incisive look at how carefully constructed a nation and its capitalist enterprises can be—how easily they can all topple too). Perhaps it’s Yuan’s architect mind that can identify these parts so well, how our sense of who we are, our productivity, and our capacity for joy can be funneled into the frame of the U.S. empire. It is Yuan’s same vision, however, that brings us such a precise look at our collective psychic state and calls us to attention to the ways in which we might rebel. Slow Render is an astounding work of criticism as much as it is a profound demonstration of what the lyric can do.”

— Muriel Leung, author of Imagine Us, the Swarm

“At its best, Slow Render is a promise. Against the surge of algorithmic urgency met by marketable quotes imposed upon much contemporary poetry, Jess Yuan’s ever-excavating line divines almost anatomically and with painstaking patience. The result is a calculating and darkly comic rediscovery of capitalized landscapes, of advertising imagery inextricable from the perceived world, of language as it reflects the labor(er)s we elide. “This too is our work.” Whether the active engineers of these bizarre topographies, or a child who tries relating to people within and across the inherited architecture, always curious, Yuan’s speakers are consistently, well, weird—enough to deliver this unheimlich likeness of everyday living as though they are alive for the very first time. Through these poems the grid of our awry plans for habitation newly illuminates, and the grotesquery is remarkable.”

— Justin Phillip Reed, author of With Bloom Upon Them and Also with Blood

“Reading Slow Render, I marvel at both its precision and scope. The possible readings packed into its two-word title should give a reader new to Jess Yuan’s work a first glimpse of her command of language, its potential for clarity and density at once: in it, one finds the stuttering skips that call attention to the limits of our human-made systems, yes—but also the possibility of careful attention, what we might still make of close looking over time. There are also the visceral industrial and agricultural definitions of “render” as an extractive melting down—definitions that the book contextualizes as ecological and dizzyingly, inexorably global. In Yuan’s debut full-length collection, you’ll find fierce questioning and reckoning, as well as joy in discovery and invention and the structures of nature, beauty to be found in a burning world.” 

— Dora Malech, author of Stet and Flourish

Excerpt from Slow Render

ON THE SET OF BIG BROTHER

In The Real World, each wall must compress

its own secret. Cameramen piercing
into some wet out-turned sac, dye-saturated chamber
held close to its neighbor

by postproduction. Replacing insulation, breathing heavy
when it starts to get Real.

Crowding to the one-way mirror or cooling vent,
behind the space

called thickness, larger than what it watches
discerningly. Where the magic happens.

A door, squeezing one room

out of another. Calling loudly upstairs when upstairs
grays into empty
thirty lateral steps from the entrance.

Why bother coming in from the sun?

Why count your stars in a four-sided room, swallowing
two sides before the main meal
is trucked into

the kitchen, which must have everything wrong,

which revolves
around its main appliance, the spiral stair.
Every door and its lever

leaning in
to the long stretch of hallway lined with pinhole
incandescents below

backup floodlight surveillance, past
the lengthy processional

one stranger used unknowingly
rather than for effect.

No weatherproofing between heat wave and hillside.