John Yau has long championed the overlooked, neglected, and misunderstood. Foreign Sounds or Sounds Foreign brings together a selection of reviews and essays touching upon a wide range of subjects. The result is a decidedly alternative view of what to pay attention to–to what might actually be new as opposed to what passes for the new. Yau’s subjects include the film stars, Anna May Wong and Sessue Hayakawa; the poets Clark Coolidge, Marilyn Chin, Christopher Middleton, Donna Stonecipher, and Ed Roberson; the filmmakers Leni Riefenstahl and Patty Chang, the collagist John Ashbery, the novelists Frederick Tuten and Amanda Lee Koe, and the photographers Rudy Burckhardt and Ai Weiwei. No other reviewer has written so astutely about such a wildly diverse range of subjects.