Josephine Yu with Prayer Book of the Anxious

“Josephine Yu is the author of Prayer Book of the Anxious (Elixir P, 2016), winner the Judge’s Prize of the 15th Annual Elixir Press Poetry Awards. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Ploughshares, The Southern Review, TriQuarterly, and Crab Orchard Review, as well as the anthology Old Flame: From the First 10 Years of 32 Poems Magazine. Mark Strand selected her work for inclusion in Best New Poets 2008. Thrice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, she won the Ploughshares 2013 Emerging Writers Contest, Meridian’s 2010 Editor’s Prize, the New Letters 2010 Poetry Award, and the New Letters 2010–2011 Readers Award for Poetry.”

“Yu’s “Prayer Book of the Anxious” unites us since we all experience anxiety and worries and we all aim toward our dreams and longings. It is this vulnerability that makes us human; thus, even Yu’s speakers that lie end up representing truth—human truth.”

—Newfound review

“In Prayer Book of the Anxious, Josephine Yu explores the tenacity of the human spirit, in all its quirkiness and fallibility. Her poems reveal holiness in paying attention to the earthly and human rather than the heavenly and angelic. These poems revel in human empathy and desire for community. They celebrate inclusivity as they reside in the space between the self and the other.”

—Tupelo Quarterly review

“In Josephine Yu’s debut collection you’ll find weeping and gnashing of teeth, grief and profound loneliness, in words that ‘throb on the page like nerves.’ There’s also a belief in transformation, and in moments that can only be called grace: the upwelling tenderness for strangers, getting stoned behind the school library, embracing a lover from behind as he washes the dishes. For Yu, ‘the god of despair’ is ‘the father of the god of attention,’ and these poems are marvelously attentive to the shifting tides in the self as it performs its daily offices of sorrow and love.”

—Kim Addonizio, author of Tell Me and The Poet’s Companion