“Shin Yu Pai’s imagination is like a fine pottery bowl, delicately shaped but capable of holding many things: playfulness, candor, descriptive elegance. She is working out her own welcome blend of cultures, Eastern and Western, and Equivalence is the lovely and often challenging result.” – Rosellen Brown

“Shin Yu Pai matches a painter’s grasp of the materiality of things with the poet’s trick of arranging word for maximum musical effect. She knows that in poetry it is the music that keeps in the mind what is seen. Her poems honor their imagist heritage by making it new.“ – William Corbett

"Pai offers readers a glimpse into the secret life of text in the culture – the looming, ominous backdrop to our existences. When she challenges continuity, she challenges unquestioning consumption of the shit that the system feeds us. While her poems do not offer a magical, lyrical place in which a reader can dwell, they do offer an examination of words in the world." – Olivia Cronk, Bookslut

“Pai operates along the trajectory set out by Baudrillard in the late twentieth century wherein signs are not only deconstructed into signifier and signified, but signifiers, instead of pointing to a deeper level of reality, only point to more signs, leaving representation to precede and determine the real. In Pai’s landscape, signs of the real substitute for the real, leading to a critique of the commodification of both language and visual image." – Karla Kelsey, Octopus

“I can see Pai’s poems as vessels of remembrance; an exploration of personal space that try to speak the unspeakable. Pai creates a precipitous voice. One that is fearless and figurative.” – Loren Kleinman, Sidereality

“Those professional mourners busy lamenting the current state of the poetry union—too many MFAs, too many first book prizes, too many first books, too many books—will be delighted (or perhaps vexed) to discover poet Shin Yu Pai. Though Equivalence was published by the perspicacious La Alameda Press without the occasion of a prize, Pai attended an MFA program and the book was nourished by a state grant and a visit to the MacDowell colony. And guess what? It’s a terrific, original, clean-lined book, which delivers quite a lot of substance with its polished style—more proof that the institutional support system helping young writers can be good, as opposed to deadly, for poetry.” – Joyelle McSweeney, The Constant Critic

“…Because her art arises from this visual and tactile world, we come to understand that the poem and/or the painting, and the world the artist inhabits, are virtually inseparable. – Barbara Jane Reyes, Tamafyhr Mountain Poetry

“Unlike many contemporary poets, Pai isn’t obsessed with documenting the stale torpor of post-modern existence or lush, picturesque, scenic backdrops. Her wordplay is rich, but never off-putting in its extravagance… The emotional payoff: Temporal concerns surrounded by a uniquely transcendent aura. The end result: a lilting journey through perpetual spaces and multicultural hope that demands your attention.” – Chi Tung, Asia Pacific Arts

"An unnerving conjuring of adolescent dread and terror, Shin Yu Pai's Unnecessary Roughness utilizes visual and objectivist approaches to make precisely and uniquely discomforting poems." - Tony Tost, Fascicle