By Zhu Zhu
Translated by Dong Li
A poetry collection of desire, memory, and historical reflection.
Publication Date: 2018-06-26
Paperback: 9781944700690
Description
Though revered in literary circles, Chinese poet Zhu Zhu remains on the periphery, writing quietly. His work, lucidly rendered by accomplished translator Dong Li, weaves slowly through personal and larger histories to reveal an astute, painterly vision of the world. Selected from an oeuvre spanning 1990 to the present, the poems of The Wild Great Wall animate seeming minutiae and collective memory to interrogate the nature of time and the encounters that occupy it. Tight as a wound rope, they bind to the interiority of the mind and wait to be unraveled.
Reviews
“Embers, when dark enough, can be used for mirrors." The three decades of Zhu Zhu’s poetry collected in The Wild Great Wall salvage a darkling mirrorwork from the remains of what’s burned away. A resonant poet of desire, memory, and historical reflection, Zhu Zhu has found an apt translator in Dong Li, who understands that “reunion happens in other people’s books, / happens in translation, / happens in a foreign land.” The Wild Great Wall will introduce American readers to a singular poetic consciousness adrift in modernity like “a floating bottle of morrow.”
—Srikanth Reddy, author of Voyager and Changing Subjects: Digressions in Modern American Poetry