"A beautifully bittersweet ode to the many layers that compound over time to make up ourselves." - Bryn Robinson - The Miramichi Reader
"The Last to the Party is a remarkable debut, both captivating and thought-provoking. Yang has a remarkable ability to capture the complexities of the human experience with great insight. With profound themes, and beauty in language, this collection will resonate with many readers" - Puneet Dutt - Hamilton Review of Books
"The Last to the Party is a work of extraordinary beauty, pain, and honesty. Yang achieves flight in this poetry collection. It soars." - Amanda Earl - Canthius
"In one of the finest debuts I've read in some time, Yang writes of a prairie childhood, various travel, family and family roots and youthful adventures, rebellions and reconciliations, her lyrics offering a richness that is confident and subtle." - rob mclennan - rob mclennan's blog
"A book made of imagistic brilliance and searing honesty. As we shift from Saskatoon to Shanxi, the eyes in these poems see everything." - Tim Lilburn, author of Harmonia Mundi
"Chuqiao Yang's poems burst with desire, memory, and intelligence as she navigates subjects such as family, cultures, identity, and coming of age. Nothing is too much for Yang as she "balk[s] at the thought of a life without the full / brute strength of desire." Refracted in these pages is a poetic self that is "untethered, boundless." A luminous debut." - Gillian Sze, author of Quiet Night Think
"In poems that are poignant, often funny, and always questioning, Chuqiao Yang invokes an intricate series of bridges that connects daughter, parents, extended family, and ancestors. As Yang writes, "I've returned from the future, and brought back / who I intend to be." This remarkable, compelling debut is a "feast of friendship" and family, departures and reunions." - Sylvia Legris, author of The Principle of Rapid Peering
"There is a glorious, animating rage to many of these poems, a refined and sharpened blade that dazzles as it strikes -- unsparing and incisive in both critique and self-recrimination, delivering curses so brilliant and biting you'll wish to feed them to your worst enemies. Equally inspired are the poems that thrum with love, tangling with the enormity of familial love and its layers of history, guilt, and grief. Chuqiao Yang is a poet in control of the full power of her voice." - Kim Fu, author of How Festive the Ambulance