In 2018, Yanyi's manuscript was selected as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. Carl Phillips, the judge for the competition, said of his manuscript: “As its title implies, ‘The Year of Blue Water’ reads as a record of time, a kind of daybook of observations in sentences so crystalline, spare, direct, and yet offhand, that it can be easy to miss, at first, the book’s complexity...The poems...[invite] us into the life they invoke, a life that both argues for and is an example of how identity is multifaceted: the poems’ speaker is an artist, of an apparent immigrant background, is trans, is deeply invested in friendship as a rescuing form of community. Identity, then, as not any one of these things but all of them, each marker of identity at once incidental and essential.”[6]
Identity features prominently in Yanyi's work, who said of this collection, "What I was writing had to be free from the idea of it being a product—free of the idea that it would educate people about what it's like to be a queer and trans Chinese-American person in the world."[7]
In 2022, Dream of the Divided Field was published. Yanyi said, "The book asks the larger question of how one retains or has a self between two moments in time. It asks if it is possible for that same person to exist."[8]
