That translator Dong Li calls Chinese poet Ye Hui “metaphysical” in his introduction to The Ruins—a characterisation repeated in the book’s marketing material—might seem challenging, but in the fact the poems, while not exactly straightforward or immediately obvious, are—for most part—eminently accessible and interesting.
Author: Peter Gordon
In an epilogue to his new book Assassins and Templars, Steve Tibble says (or, perhaps, protests) that his book really has nothing to do with the video game “Assassin’s Creed”, that any similarity is not so much coincidence as common intellectual and cultural ancestry. Readers of a certain generation might entertain some skepticism, especially in light of Tibble’s colloquial (albeit steadfastly rigorous) approach to the subject. Tibble might nevertheless have been aware of some pop-culture competition for reader mind-space, for he has written a page-turner of a history.
Expat memoirs, even (or perhaps especially) of the East Asian variety, are a venerable genre. One suspects that even in the early days, what authors presented as new and exotic, probably wasn’t really. In these days of ubiquitous travel videos on YouTube, this is probably even more the case. As a result, such books need a good raconteur or prose stylist to pass muster. Fortunately, Connla Stokes is both.
If one ever forgets what poetry is for, this newly-released collection is a reminder of its ability to renew, sooth and provoke. Mirror is a translation of a lengthy posthumous selection of Chinese poet Zhang Zao’s lifelong opus.
Political memoirs or, worse, philosophical treatises by political leaders, are often books best avoided. Yet Anwar Ibrahim’s recent Rethinking Ourselves is nonetheless one the most erudite collection of essays out in this or any recent year.
Although no longer as true as it was, East Asian trade in the early-modern period is often presented from the perspective of one more Western nation or another: the Spain’s Manila Galleon trade, the Portuguese spice trade and unique base in Macau, the Dutch East India Company, and latterly, the British via Canton and Hong Kong.
Prose poetry can be hard to get a handle on. It is literally oxymoronic, like “documentary fiction”; such terms are perhaps a recognition that most categories are really endpoints on a spectrum. As one now does in these situations, one asks AI, which unhelpfully replied: “Prose poetry is a hybrid literary form that adopts the structural format of prose—paragraphs without line breaks—while employing the stylistic and rhetorical devices of poetry.”
Mesopotamia is having a moment. Moudhy Al-Rashid’s Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History, joins among others Land Between the Rivers: A 5,000-Year History of Iraq by Bartle Bull, The Center of the World: A Global History of the Persian Gulf from the Stone Age to the Present by Allen James Fromherz and, some more esoterically, Enheduana: The Complete Poems of the World’s First Author by Sophus Helle, all released in the last 12 months or so.
Mandy Moe Pwint Tu describes herself as “a pile of ginkgo leaves in a trench coat from Yangon, Myanmar”; it perhaps comes as no surprise that she is a poet. She is also one now firmly ensconced in American poetry circles and with an MFA under her belt. Fablemaker is her first full-length collection and includes poems from her earlier chapbooks.
It never rains but it pours. From having no English translations of Akutagawa Prize-winning Rie Qudan, three of her novels have (or soon will have) become available in a matter of months, the first two—“Schoolgirl” and “Bad Music”—in a combined volume from Australian publisher Gazebo and Sympathy Tower Tokyo from Penguin in Britain and Summit in the US.
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