Observations of life, from East to West: the transformation of Hong Kong over the years; the beauties and troubles of Asia and of other countries; the re-visitation of Italy, her homeland, after many years of living abroad. Also vivid descriptions of the many facets of everyday life, including love, friendship, motherhood, and writing.
Chifa. The word may not immediately register with visitors, but once said out loud, the origins of the term for the ubiquitous Chinese restaurants in Peru are obvious to anyone with even a smattering of Cantonese. Arroz chaufa soon becomes recognizable (if somewhat redundant) as fried rice. Once the surprise wears off, it is of course entirely natural. There is a large Chinese diaspora in Latin America for much same reason as there is in the US, UK and Australia.
Fiona Sze-Lorrain, a distinguished poet herself, is also a busy and prolific translator of Chinese poetry, which is very fortunate both for the poets themselves, who get exposure to a readership outside China, and for readers, whose literary horizons are expanded thanks to her sensitive and careful work. Here are two volumes of poetry written by people whose backgrounds and experiences are completely different; Yu Xiuhua (b 1976) is a single mother with cerebral palsy, and Yin Lichuan (b 1973) a Beijing-based multi-disciplinary artist and founder-member of what Chinese critics call the Lower Body Movement of poetry, of which more later.
This ambitious first poetry collection deals confessionally with the loss of scientist and poet Jenny Qi’s mother and her own childhood, loss of lovers and friends, ecology, racism and her mixed heritage. There is no fixed focal point linking poems sequentially; a narrative chronology threads the work instead.
Zilka Joseph is a poet in Michigan whose writing is informed by her immigrant experience, an unusual one at that for it’s not just that she was born and raised in India: she’s also Bene Israel, the name for Indian Jews who have lived on the subcontinent for two thousand years. Her new book of poetry, In Our Beautiful Bones, tells mostly of her experiences in the United States.
Aigerim Tazhi is a Kazakh poet whose writings will impress you and move you, a new and exciting voice which, thanks to the work of James Kates, a distinguished translator of Russian, can now finally be heard in English. It goes without saying that the literature of Central Asia and the newly-independent countries of the former Soviet Union needs to be better-known, and this slim volume is a fine contribution to it.
A Vietnamese poet writing in Hebrew?
