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
Finalist, The Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry
Shortlist, Lucien Stryker Asian Translation Prize
Longlist, National Book Critics Circle Barrios Book in Translation Prize
Longlist, National Translation Award for Poetry
“Ye is a poet of the countryside, preoccupied with the organic and the concrete. Yet his spare, painterly poems also open onto a metaphysical world just beyond reach. There is focus and quietness here, but also a sense of omens, myths and mysteries pressing in from outside and threatening violence round the edges. The flow of time seems to break down and open into dense moments of philosophy. The natural and the human world blend into elegiac lyrics with surprising turns, captured in a distilled, resistant language by Dong Li: ‘Last year I planted loofahs / And a few gourds grew.’” —Judges citation, Longlist, National Translation Award in Poetry
“Ye Hui’s The Ruins intuitively shapeshifts between the metaphysical and the organic, transforming a ‘crawling’ soul into a black bird, then a ‘lost dog’ that ‘follows human shadows.’ Embracing fate, the blooming of fruit trees in the poet’s universe requires ‘an eerie ritual / of sacrifice . . .’ Unlike Shelley’s Ozymandias, where decayed monuments symbolize failed imperial hubris, Ye Hui’s ruins, via Dong Li’s graceful translation, embody a cyclical view of nature and human existence. By asking if some wreckage might just be an ‘unfinished castle’—or a metamorphosis in progress—Ye Hui articulates a dispassionate yet hopeful view on the eternal fluidity of all things.” —Judges citation, Shortlist, Lucien Stryker Asian Translation Prize
“Eminently accessible and interesting.” —Asian Review of Books
“The poems in The Ruins transform familiar objects—faces, rain, fireflies, trains—into sites of metaphysical inquiry. By juxtaposing striking and clear images, Ye draws a world untethered to linear time, one that hovers on the borders of the mundane and the uncanny, the known and the strange, the foretold and the happening.” —Poets & Writers
“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
“[Ye Hui] has made it his vocation to observe the world around him and remind others that, despite what we might want or think, the universe carries on without us according to its own set of rules. This is nowhere clearer than in these poems, a metaphysical patchwork of natural imagery . . . Ye Hui sees the underlying connections between things, and channels the revelations through the medium of Dong Li’s telescopic translation.” —China Book Review