Making the Best of It

Making the Best of It is a poet’ s assemblage of selves. Through attentive self-portraits, Kenton K. Yee continuously pierces the self to see the world with greater clarity, tracing an unlikely journey from mathematics and theoretical physics to art and poetry. Yee’ s perspective is sometimes scientific, sometimes surreal, but every line lands on the unexpected. In these poems, all the known and described world is possible site of creative inquiry for the curious and restless poet. At its heart, Making the Best of It is a celebration of the imagination and the artist’ s call for imagination as an ongoing discipline.

Born to Chinese-American parents whose fathers and grandfathers have worked as migrant laborers in the United States since the late 1800s, Kenton K. Yee grew up in San Francisco’ s Chinatown. He studied mathematics and science writing at MIT before earning a PhD in theoretical physics from UCLA and law and business degrees from Stanford. Yee taught at Columbia University and consults in Silicon Valley.