The poetry of John Yau has examined identity and exile through complex portraits of pop culture icons. His portraits of Peter Lorre as Mr. Moto draw upon postmodern techniques from the visual arts, particularly the aesthetic strategies of Jasper Johns, and his poetic experiments embody the thematics of interior exile and displacement in dense surrealist texts. His dominant strategy is to undermine representation in ways similar to both philosophies of deconstruction and postmodern aesthetics, but without losing sight of the cultural politics of ethnicity.