the blueshift journal
blueshift / ˈblo͞oˌSHift / noun
the displacement of the spectrum to shorter wavelengths in the light coming from distant celestial objects moving toward the observer.
August 2016
Shin Yu Pai is a 2014 Stranger Genius Award nominee and the author of eight books of poetry. Her work has appeared in publications throughout the U.S., Japan, China, Taiwan, The United Kingdom, and Canada. Poems have been commissioned by the Dallas Museum of Art twice and her work is also featured in the Poetry-in-Motion Program sponsored by DART. She has been a featured presenter at national and international literary festivals including the Geraldine Dodge Poetry Festival and the Montreal Zen Poetry Festival. In 2010, she became a member of the Macondo Workshop for Writers.
Her essays and nonfiction writing have appeared in Tricycle, YES! Magazine, The Rumpus, City Arts, The Stranger, Medium, Thought Catalog, International Examiner, Ballard News-Tribune, Seattle Globalist, and ParentMap. She is founding editor of Lawrence & Crane publications.
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Shin Yu’s visual work has been exhibited work at The McKinney Avenue Contemporary, The Paterson Museum, The American Jazz Museum, The Three Arts Club of Chicago, Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago, and the International Print Center. She is a member of the Mother Load collective.
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Shin Yu has served as a poet-in-residence for the Seattle Art Museum and is a three-time fellow of the MacDowell Colony. As an independent events producer, she has curated literary programming for On the Boards, The Crow Collection of Asian Art, The Women’s Museum of Dallas, and The Rubin Museum of Art. She is former assistant curator for the Wittliff Collections.
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Shin Yu received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MA in Museology from the University of Washington.
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Body Worlds
originally published in EOAGH
sideshow with science
at best, grosses over
a billion worldwide
Van Hagen’s moniker
brands the base of
a woman on bent knees
releasing a dense red
cloud of doves in flight
skin pulled from flesh
to fashion angel wings
the goalkeeper blocks
a soccer ball with one
hand, shows off internal
organs with the other,
dappled grey of smoker’s
lung, or just industrial air
pollution? A man parts
the horse’s mane in
the second sequence
of tai-chi, hip &
knee joints replaced
with steel, corpses
stolen from mental hospitals
the undocumented bodies
of the executed, bullet holes
found in a specimen’s head-
quartered in Dalian & Krygystan
the humanity of bodies stripped
of skin, fatty tissue, age & eye color
a cadaver sliced in two, Hirst’s
“mother & child divided,”
chain-sawed parts & not a whole
or was it “two fucking & two
watching” Von Hagen’s wife
push a rolling pin over what
was once a length of man.
In the educational model
of the body’s burden,
I feel the pounding of
my own enlarged heart.
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