About the Book

Before Leaving the Island explores the dislocations of midlife with wry compassion.

Using poetic forms ranging from the traditional to the experimental and mining 30 years of experience in Asia, Fadely traces an archipelago that takes us from civil unrest to pandemic quarantine in Hong Kong, and from an abandoned fort in Taiwan to a coin-op laundromat that launders more than just clothes. Along the way, we’re set straight by Confucius, a traditional Chinese bonesetter and the laws of physics, reminded of the raw and humbling power of nature, and drawn into intermittent conversation with Impressionist painter Gustave Caillebotte, whose works inspire the poems punctuating the book’s four sections.

With poignancy laced with irony, Fadely shows us a world where we “can no longer afford to have expectations” but can find consolation in language. As he reminds us in “This Is Plagiarism”, “if your material’s raw / and my fakes are real / then between us we steal / poetry.”

About the Author

Before Leaving the Island is John Fadely's debut book of poetry.

John earned his B.A. from Princeton University in 1991 (summa cum laude), where he majored in East Asian Studies and took a gap year in 1989-1990 to study Mandarin Chinese in Taipei at the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies. Upon returning to Princeton in 1990, John found himself among a large group of high-profile dissidents who had fled China following the Tiananmen Square protests; many of them became his friends and broadened his perspectives. He returned to Taiwan to work as a translator and marketing researcher before attending Columbia University, graduating in 1999 with J.D. and MBA degrees. John then practiced corporate law for 25 years in the Hong Kong, New York, Tokyo and Singapore offices of U.S. law firms, specializing in advising private equity funds and institutional investors on fundraising and other transactions. As a partner for 18 years, John was recognized as a leading lawyer by various industry publications, including Chambers & Partners, Legal 500 and IFLR1000.

John’s spouse Yuhwa is a graphic designer and painter, and through their shared interest in the visual arts, John first encountered the paintings of Gustave Caillebotte at Musée D’Orsay shortly before several of Caillebotte’s works were featured in exhibitions at The Getty and The Art Institute of Chicago in 2025. Caillebotte painted both urban and rural scenes in a unique realist-Impressionist style and was a generous patron of the arts who financially supported several of his fellow Impressionists, as well as being a passionate boatsman and horticulturist. He also became John’s visual muse: each of the four sections of Before Leaving the Island ends with an ekphrastic poem inspired by Caillebotte’s works.

Fluent in Mandarin Chinese and trained in classical Chinese, John is currently co-translating an illustrated edition of Tang and Song dynasty poetry. He is also in the process of starting Fifth Stanza Press, a small press that will focus on publishing poetry written by first-time midlife poets. In 2021 John co-founded a reading group that explores modern and contemporary long poems through close readings, and he has been an active participant in the Modern & Contemporary American Poetry (ModPo) community hosted by the Kelly Writers House at University of Pennsylvania.