During the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States, hate crimes against Asian American women included some particularly gruesome murders. In March 2021, a man shot and killed six Asian women at two massage parlors and a spa. In January 2022, Michelle Alyssa Go was pushed by a man onto the subway tracks in New York…
Chinese Buddhist poetry traditionally calls to mind ancient monks like Hanshan, traveling up mountains in terrible poverty. Zhang Ruzhao does not really fit into that mold. For one she was born in the turn of the 20th century, earning an English degree in 1925, then later worked at a local office for the National Party…
The life of the Japanese poet Chūya Nakahara (generally referred to by his given name, Chūya) followed an archetypal pattern of tragic genius ending in early death. Chūya was born in 1907 and, by his own account, began writing poetry in response to the death of his infant brother, when Chūya was seven. After a…
The poetic tradition of China has historically found a warm welcome in Japan, and both cultures draw on a common well of poets, religious currents, and sacred texts. It is thus fitting that two new volumes by essential poets from each country should be published nearly side by side by New Directions. The first, Cold…
James Shea, whose day job is professor at Baptist University, is something of a fixture in the Hong Kong poetry scene. His latest collection Last Day of My Face, however, is published out of Iowa University Press, a result of it having won the Iowa Poetry Prize. It’s not a long collection, less than 60…
Xuela Zhang is a translator and scholar in addition to a poet; she writes in English and Chinese. In her wry, ambitious, and elegant debut collection of poetry, To Compare, she trains her exacting and precise eye on the experience of living between the US and China, translation and language, and the skewed, discriminatory power…
First published anonymously in March 2014 as a series of blog posts, Lady No is Kim Hyesoon’s latest collection of poetry translated into English. These posts were written during the most politically significant years of South Korea, when the ferry MV Sewol sank, killing 304 people, including 250 high school students. The event and the…
Jennifer Wong’s Light Year is a meditation on separation and exile, tracking the concerns of other authors of the Hong Kong diaspora. The title is especially appropriate for the theme: a unit of measurement that calculates distance through the optics of speed and time. Indeed, the poetry focuses on the geographical distance between the United…
Jiban Narah’s The Yellow Metaphor is an unassuming collection of poetry, written from 1990 to 2023, that draws from the Mising and Assamese traditions of north-east India. Occasionally embedded in the English translation are the original Mising words, a translator’s decision to retain the otherworldliness of the poems. Assamese geography, fauna, and history feature prominently…
Written 40-50 years ago during the South Korean dictatorship from the 1970s-80s, now newly-translated into English and framed by reflective essays, Kim Hyesoon’s poetry collection The Hell of That Star is a violent and grotesque testament to a censored time. Having worked as an editor during the regime, Kim is familiar with the censorship apparatus…
Indian English poet Arundhati Subramaniam’s latest poetry collection The Gallery of Upside Down Women brings together pieces about women from Indian myth and scripture across regions and languages, women in general, and glimpses into ordinary lives rendered fresh and extraordinary through evocative expression. Subramaniam is among the best known Indian English poets and for her…
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. Ye Hui will often start with a line or two that…
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. Zhang, whose career spanned from the 1980s until his untimely death from cancer in 2010, spent much…
Mani Rao, who counts acclaimed translations of Kalidasa and Bhagavad Gita from Sanskrit among her accomplishments, has long been a quiet force in South Asian poetry circles. Her latest extensive collection of original poems, So That You Know, is a work of poise and clarity of thought. The poems engage with diverse themes and resist…
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…