How Do I Look?
Sennah Yee
It is beautiful because it has nothing to do with you.
Through a series of short vignettes, Sennah Yee’s debut full-length book How Do I Look? paints a colourful portrait of a woman both raised and repelled by the media. With pithy, razor-sharp prose, Sennah dissects and reassembles pop culture through personal anecdotes, crafting a love-hate letter to the media and the microaggressions that have shaped how she sees herself and the world. How Do I Look? is a raw and vulnerable reflection on identities real and imagined.
Praise
“In Yee’s poetry, whole worlds, multiple worlds, can live in just a few sentences, and countless people and histories can exist within one person’s body. It almost makes reading full novels feel silly when you can live a whole life in just one of Yee’s paragraphs.”
– Mitski, pop star
“Sennah Yee’s How Do I Look? is a selfie through a webcam in the compact mirror tossed over the shoulder of a nightswimmer into a suburban chlorine pool. These poems are the hit radio lyrics that roll around in the mind before falling asleep, the silently crafted love poems for an unrequited crush written on a blog saved in drafts, the emails sent to one’s future self opened at a karaoke bar years later in another country. How Do I Look? made me look back and get home safe. I look in the rear view mirror to find flowers growing out of me.”
– Stacey Tran, author of Soap for the Dogs
“Sennah Yee has written a book full of wit and fire. This is a work to read and reread. The individual pieces build on each other to reveal the fractured self beneath and the ways the Western world fractures people who ‘look like Mulan.’ A fierce new literary voice. Don’t miss this one.”
– Matthew Salesses, author of The Hundred-Year Flood
“At first glance, it might not seem as if How Do I Look? is about survival. But in each of these brief vignettes, Sennah Yee is tested over & over again by white supremacy, racism, fetishization, heteronormativity & all the other worst parts of Western culture that constantly deluge the screens & scenes of our upbringing. And yet, Sennah Yee survives every microaggression. Sennah Yee has teflon in her blood & How Do I Look? is sparkling sunset over Liberty City & absolute proof that she is bulletproof.”
– Orchid Cugini, author of I’m Just Happy To Be Here
Translations
¿Cómo me ves? – Paloma Ediciones (Spain)
2022 Spanish translation of How Do I Look?
Excerpts
Poetry in Voice – Internet Safety
Montreal Review of Books – Bond “Girls”
Cosmonauts Avenue – Mulan (1988); Intimates; Motherlode
Peach Mag – The Fast and the Furious (2001); Rear Window (1954); Flower Crown Snapchat Filter
Poor Claudia – 10 Poems
The Puritan – The Beach; The Desert; The Top of the Mountain; Dial-Up Internet Sounds
Reviews
Acta Victoriana – Sennah Yee’s How Do I Look, and The Pleasure of Anecdotal Storytelling
Broken Pencil – “To read Yee’s poetry feels intimate. In small vignettes written in prose poetry, it captures what it means to live in a body that is distorted by the tensions of visibility and invisibility.”
Winter Tangerine – “A quietly radical book, relentless in its unveiling of how pain is wrapped up in representation and visibility, and in its search for healing and freedom.”
Montreal Review of Books – “A poetry that can best be described as Seidel meets Bashō, meets an Instapoet.”
Daily Public – “How Do I Look? is ultimately a book about a woman of color growing up in a world of avatars and Snapchat filters, and it challenges everything from internalized racism and heteronormativity to fetishization and men in film school.”
Interviews
Shondaland – “I really think of my book as a time capsule or ‘letter from the future,’ or now, to my past self. Dialogues between my different selves and different times. Even some things I read in the book, I already don’t feel like that anymore. But I enjoy those moments, looking at myself looking at myself. It feels a little cyborgian, and stepping outside of myself is attractive to me.”
Savoir – “You know those memes that are like “how I look in my selfies vs. how I look when someone takes a photo of me?” I keep thinking about that, and how my mirror image also doesn’t look anything like photos of me, and then this snowballs to how I don’t know how OTHERS see me and how I have no control over that, and then how I don’t even know how I see others, if they themselves don’t know how to see themselves…!”
ÄLPHÄ – Interview
Hobart – “I try to return the gaze, look right back at those looking at me. It jostles people, because they’re uneasy with their object becoming a subject.”
rob mcclennan – “As for the kinds of questions that I am trying to answer with my work: Who/what has control over how I look at myself/the world? In what ways can I return this gaze and reclaim this control?”
Lists
NUVO – Contemporary Writers Redefining Poetry in Canada
El Diario – “A naked collection of poems that shamelessly enters an identity drawn through popular culture, love and everyday racism.” (Translated from Spanish)
She Does the City – Poetry You Can Fall In Love With | “How Do I Look? is an incredible collection of poems, prose, and short nonfiction by Sennah Yee, published by indie publishing darling Metatron Press. It’s a powerful love/hate letter to the media that shaped Yee, and that shaped many of us young millennials. It’s a commentary on race, and sex, and sexism, and growing up. It’s smart, searing, and sometimes hilarious. Yee’s poems are the literary versions of ‘ear worms’ – like catchy chorus lines you can’t get out of your head. Her poems are sharp, witty, vulnerable, and just so damn good. I’ve read and re-read Sennah Yee’s poems multiple times, and I am utterly obsessed. This bite-sized book of poetry packs quite a punch, and you’ll find yourself thinking about its poems long after you finish them.”
CBC Books – Your ultimate Canadian poetry list
Laomagination – 2017 Asian American Poetry Books and Chapbooks
Punch-In-The-Face Poetry – Fall 2017 Books by Poets of Color
