By Ye Hui
Translated by Dong Li
A collection of beautifully resonant metaphysical poems from a singular voice in contemporary Chinese poetry.
Publication Date: November 11, 2025
Paperback: 9781646054053
eBook: 9781646054060
Description
Here’s a witch poet walking backward into the future. There’s an architect dispelling illusions and inviting us into communal living. The poems collected in The Ruins rise from a primordial wisdom that resists the quarrels of the marketplace, that keeps company under a leaky authoritarian roof and rubs off its burn, that carves out its own impossible freedom. In Dong Li’s luminous translation of Ye’s first full-length collection, each poem braids myth and mystery, inviting the reader into a liminal space where “echoes of the ancient, the imagined, and the ‘now’ sound off each other” on the page (The Cincinnati Review).
Biographical Information
Ye Hui is an acclaimed Chinese metaphysical poet who lives in Nanjing. His poems in Dong Li’s English translation have appeared or are forthcoming in 128 Lit, The Arkansas International, Asymptote, Bennington Review, Blackbird, Cincinnati Review, Circumference, Copihue Poetry, Guernica, Kenyon Review, Lana Turner, Nashville Review, POETRY, Poetry Northwest, and Zocálo Public Square.
Dong Li is a multilingual author who translates from Chinese, English, French, and German. He is the English translator of the PEN/Heim winning The Gleaner Song by Song Lin, and The Wild Great Wall by Zhu Zhu. His PEN/Heim winning The Ruins by the Chinese poet Ye Hui is forthcoming from Deep Vellum. His debut collection of poetry, The Orange Tree, was the inaugural winner of the Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize and a finalist for the Poetry of Society of America’s T.S. Eliot Four Quartets Prize.
Reviews
“Ye Hui’s poems in The Ruins feel like mathematical equations that never quite add up. They seem eminently logical, yet they defy logic, as in “The Prophecy” where “In the yard, two birds perch in the tree/Which means it will snow tomorrow.” These poems are grounded in nature—mountains, birds, fireflies, yet they stay alight, sometimes an inch off the ground; other times, circulating in the metaphysical world. In their collage imagery, these beautiful and pensive poems seem to ask questions of everything—the day about grief, the night about light, this world about the next.” —Victoria Chang, author of OBIT
“These are poems that create their own unostentatious universe, inviting us in with subtle gestures that seem to know our own minds better than we do. Once inside, we gradually come to understand this world to be our own, recognizable yet cast in a new light by Ye Hui’s acute vision and imaginative power. Here, tradition and universals are pitted against the contemporary condition, not in competition but in fruitful tension, a kind of metaphysical dance. Dong Li, himself a masterful poet, renders these verses with precision and verve, a testament to what translation can accomplish when practiced at its highest level. Here, in the space opened up to us, “there aren’t unicorns or swords / But the void when the truth comes into view.” —Eleanor Goodman, translator and author of Nine Dragon Island
“Ye Hui has accomplished true independence, something increasingly rare in contemporary poetry. He is not associated with any group or tendency, and his poems are unlike anyone else’s. In his work, he transports us to places that are familiar, but seen for what they are—the invisible ripples of an indifferent universe. He writes: “The fireflies, now bright, now dim / Just as we live but use up all the wisdom / That lights up what’s behind us.” He recognizes we are isolated from each other and the world is inexplicable: “Besides, how can you explain / The hand that once waved you farewell / Now holds in some courtyard / A pot with a long handle burning.” Inhabitants of a broken world, and knowing our shared fate, Ye Hui never loses his tender feelings for his subjects: “We walk into a house / Cooling from many who have died there.” These are poems we need.” —John Yau, author of Diary of Small Discontents: New & Selected Poems 1974-2024
“While it may be true, as poet-translator Dong Li explains, that Ye Hui ‘does not belong to any school, clique, or scene,’ of contemporary Chinese poetry, the poems in The Ruins display a deeper, timeless kinship that transcends language, style, and even culture. Dong Li’s renditions into English allow the reader to glimpse the abiding mystery lurking just beneath the surface of Ye’s poems. Rereading them over several months, as they now routinely beckon my return, I have come to recognize an underlying wisdom I now identify as uniquely Ye’s. We are so lucky to have these strange and magnificent poems in English, to incite our wonder as we face ‘the void when the truth comes into view.’” —Shook, translator and founder of Phoneme Media