How Do I Look

Through a series of short vignettes, Sennah Yee’s debut full-length book How Do I Look? paints a colourful portrait of a woman both raised and repelled by the media. With pithy, razor-sharp prose, Sennah dissects and reassembles pop culture through personal anecdotes, crafting a love-hate letter to the media and the microaggressions that have shaped how she sees herself and the world. How Do I Look? is a raw and vulnerable reflection on identities real and imagined. Praise“In Yee’s poetry, whole worlds, multiple worlds, can live in just a few sentences, and countless people and histories can exist within one person’s body. It almost makes reading full novels feel silly when you can live a whole life in just one of Yee’s paragraphs. ”– Mitski, pop star“Sennah Yee’s How Do I Look? is a selfie through a webcam in the compact mirror tossed over the shoulder of a nightswimmer into a suburban chlorine pool. These poems are the hit radio lyrics that roll around in the mind before falling asleep, the silently crafted love poems for an unrequited crush written on a blog saved in drafts, the emails sent to one’s future self opened at a karaoke bar years later in another country. How Do I Look? made me look back and get home safe. I look in the rear view mirror to find flowers growing out of me. ” – Stacey Tran, author of Soap for the Dogs“Sennah Yee has written a book full of wit and fire. This is a work to read and reread. The individual pieces build on each other to reveal the fractured self beneath and the ways the Western world fractures people who ‘look like Mulan. ’ A fierce new literary voice. Don’t miss this one. ”– Matthew Salesses, author of The Hundred-Year Flood“At first glance, it might not seem as if How Do I Look? is about survival. But in each of these brief vignettes, Sennah Yee is tested over & over again by white supremacy, racism, fetishization, heteronormativity & all the other worst parts of Western culture that constantly deluge the screens & scenes of our upbringing. And yet, Sennah Yee survives every microaggression. Sennah Yee has teflon in her blood & How Do I Look? is sparkling sunset over Liberty City & absolute proof that she is bulletproof. ”– Orchid Cugini, author of I’m Just Happy To Be Here