"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