Perennial Counterpart

NAMED ONE OF LITERARY HUB’S ‘MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2026’

A poetic study in magical modes of connection over distance – how both friendship and reading are similar ways of being together while being alone.

Written over several years of solitude, study, and transformation, the poems in Perennial Counterpart trace an evolving, self-questioning practice of thinking-in-poetry where long, reflective lines – evoking both prose and photography – brush against elliptical, fractured modes of film and literary criticism. Anchored by the author’s obsessive reading life, this is a book where lyric inquiry becomes its own form of company. Here, the poem is written to remake its writer through glittering connections to a personal lineage of thought.

‘Chen’s crystalline debut explores memory, nostalgia, and identity in poems that jump-cut between locations – Barcelona, Berlin, Ithaca, New York City…Readers will savor this strong and cerebral study of selfhood.’ – Publishers Weekly

‘Are these poems, or exploding postcards dispatched from the land of dreams? Yongyu Chen’s exquisite Perennial Counterpart balances conceptual density with a yearning lyricism: always strange, “unintelligible to the end,” but intelligible to those who speak the language of rain and flowers. A monumental debut.’ – Jackie Wang

‘To be with Perennial Counterpart is to “river around” the intimate folds of its letters, lovers, loved ones, literary souls. Like the strange “fur that grows on a crystal,” Yongyu Chen’s probing language turns mixture into a beguiling poetics of friendship, a reverie for a more elemental and rejuvenated address to our unsettled world.’ – Jay Gao

‘What a gift it is to climb into each of Yongyu Chen’s rapturous, cinematic, philosophical lines, and find myself in a world that so much and so many insist cannot be…A generous, exquisite debut.’ – Tracy K. Smith