The Review of Contemporary Fiction

My Heart Is That Eternal Rose Tattoo, by John Yau
reviewed by Brian Evenson

John Yau. My Heart Is That Eternal Rose Tattoo. Black Sparrow, 2001. 165 pp. Paper: $17.95.

My Heart Is That Eternal Rose Tattoo appeared almost simultaneously with Yau’s Borrowed Love Poems, but while that latter book declares its affiliation to poetry in its title, My Heart’s affiliations are harder to figure out. Indeed, My Heart offers sixty-three pieces of prose, ranging in length from a single sentence to eleven pages. At moments these remind one of the prose poetry found in Yau’s Radiant Silhouette and Forbidden Entries, but at others they drift closer toward narrative, recalling Lydia Davis’s short shorts. What is interesting is the range of these pieces, the way that each of the six sections of this short book takes a different approach to notions of what prose is or can be. In one section, for instance, elusive prose snippets seem to accumulate from piece to piece into something larger for the section as a whole. Another section contains only one piece with a clear and very direct narrative. Still others pursue various complex negotiations between genres. In the first section in particular, Yau pursues strategies that recall the innovative prose of Jason Schwartz’s A German Picturesque or Ben Marcus’s The Age of Wire and String without being beholden to either. Taken as a whole, My Heart Is That Eternal Rose Tattoo serves as an effective esquisse on the history of prose, with Yau gleefully straddling genres in all possible ways.