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LIGHTWALL
Liliana Ursu
From the Romanian by Sean Cotter
Poetry
ISBN 0-9815521-2-9 (paper) $15.00
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6 x 8
152 pages [Bilingual Romanian/English]

Romanian Liliana Ursu writes poetry that is wild and unpredictable, on the brink of flying away beyond real and imagined borders. Her short poems are stunning, unforgettable, and expertly translated into exciting English texts by Sean Cotter…. This is one of those books by a European poet that an English reader can pick up and wonder at how the translator did it. We also read in awe as Ursu leads every naïve person by the nose and jumps into the abyss.
—Ray Gonzalez, Bloomsbury Review

Liliana Ursu is one of Romania's best examples of “the new internationalism,” as Andrew Wachtel has called the phenomenon: she is a poet who explores Romania's new relationship with Europe and the United States. Romania's abrupt political changes at the end of 1989 resulted in surprising turns in the course of Liliana's biography, changes that she was uniquely prepared to examine. Already an established poet during the Communist period, Liliana has spent the past two decades in communion with American poets, through the Fulbright program and poetry residencies. Her poems take up both American and Romanian topics, puzzling out connections that the countries themselves are in the process of creating.

This volume's organization extends her international concerns to spiritual questions. A section inspired by her time at Bucknell in Lewisburg complements a section on the spiritual trials of the Balkans. They pivot around a cycle of poems dedicated to the sufferings of Ovid, who died an exile in Tomis (today the Black Sea port of Constanţa in Romania). Through this middle section, Liliana keeps her reader aware of the pains of those who cannot travel, not for political but for economic reasons. Such is her generosity. As Liliana's poetry has evolved in the past decades, it has become more religious. This is due not only to the fact that religious poetry is no longer censored, but also to Liliana's greater awareness of her region's spiritual sufferings, an area where religion has led as much to bloodshed as to succor. “Balkan” comes from the Turkish word for “mountain,” and its spiritual struggles suffuse the book's last section, “Balkan Golgotha.” Likewise, the last poem elaborates the spiritual meaning of the book's title. The image of the Mother of God transforms Balkan cement casements into lightwalls of another kind. Internationalism also characterizes the history of this publication: these poems will appear as a book in English before they do in Romanian.
—from the Introduction by Sean Cotter

Liliana Ursu is a poet, prose writer, and translator, with eighteen books published in Romania. She has been translated into many languages, including three previous books in English. She lives in Bucharest, teaching courses in poetry and creative writing, producing occasional radio programs for România cultural, and writing. She has received two Fulbright grants and taught creative writing at the University of Louisville and at Bucknell University, in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

Sean Cotter is the translator of several books from Romanian, including Liliana Ursu’s Goldsmith Market (Zephyr Press, 2003). He is a professor of Literature and Translation Studies at The University of Texas at Dallas, where he is a part of the Center for Translation Studies.

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DOOR LANGUAGES
Zafer Şenocak
From the German by Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright
Poetry
ISBN 978-0-939010-78-3 (paper) $15.00
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6 x 8
148 pages [bilingual German/English]

Door Languages, in Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright's brilliant translation, sends us news of the stranger within us who keeps putting on and taking off a cloak of invisibility. This is bracing work. Line by insinuating line, Zafer Şenocak peels back our most rigid assumptions. These poems, marked by the highest ambition, read like folk tales from the future.
—Lee Upton, author of Undid in the Land of Undone

… a fine edgy satisfyingly demystifying voice.
—Askold Melnyczuk

from Door Languages I

Doors don't say much to those who disclose nothing
once the inhabitants of a city that no longer exists
introduced a door language
Closed
Open
Left ajar
With or without latch
Locked
Pick-locked
in different colors
each door had its own meaning
that was long ago

today it doesn't rest so much on the door
but on the keys
on the one whose hand holds the keys
at the moment of arrival

who can find the patience to learn a new door language
there are more languages than people
the keys are in the pocket
the code in the mind

if necessary the door is kicked open

Born in Ankara in 1961, Zafer Şenocak moved to Munich with his parents in 1970 where he studied political science, philosophy, and literature. He started publishing books of poetry and essays in the nineteen eighties in Munich winning the Adelbert von Chamisso Award, a literary prize given in Germany for foreigners writing in German. In addition to poetry and fiction, he has a substantial body of work as an essayist of political and social criticism, largely stemming from his years as a contributor to the Berlin alternative daily newspaper die tagezeitung.

Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright's translations of contemporary German poets have appeared in various journals and anthologies. She has received a number of honors, including an NEA fellowship to translate the work of Zafer Şenocak. She served as the German-language contributing editor for the 2008 Graywolf anthology New European Poets and with Franz Wright co-translated the book Factory of Tears by Valzhyna Mort.

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PEREGRINARY
Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki
From the Polish by Bill Johnston
Poetry
ISBN 978-0-939010-97-4 (paper) $14.95
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6 x 8
148 pages [bilingual Polish/English]

Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki is an unusual poet in both the context of his native Poland and that of world literature. Though his poems contain numerous literary and cultural references, he is not an “esthetic” poet like, say, Zbigniew Herbert or Adam Zagajewski. Though Dycki's poems are intensely personal, they are not so in the obvious sense that one finds in the poetry of Czesław Miłosz or Wisława Szymborska. And though Dycki's writing is firmly rooted in historical context, this dimension too is recast in a way not found in other Polish poets either of his own or preceding generations.

from Ad Benevolum Lectorem

2.
do not let yourself be caught
in the snare I set for you
from the very first poem
I was thinking how to swallow you

and the thought gave me wings
and gives me wings still
so stop yourself from going mad
and send me away while you still have

the strength because in tangling with me
you are certain to lose in tangling
with me you'll come out a bigger
fool than the author of this book

Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki was born in 1962 in southeastern Poland close to the Ukrainian border. Author of nine collections of poetry, he has won numerous literary prizes both in Poland and elsewhere, including the prestigious Kazimiera Iakowiczówna Prize, the Barbara Sadowska Prize, and Germany's Hubert Burda Prize. His work has previously appeared in various English-language journals as well as in the Zephyr Press anthology Carnivorous Boy Carnivorous Bird. Peregrinary is his first book-length publication in English.

Bill Johnston has held translation fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities; in 2005 he won the translation award of AATSEEL for his rendering of Magdalena Tulli's prose poem Dreams and Stones. He teaches literary translation at Indiana University, where he is also director of the Polish Studies Center.

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FEELINGS ABOVE SEA LEVEL: PROSE POEMS
FROM THE CHINESE OF SHANG QIN
Shang Qin
From the Chinese by Steve Bradbury
Poetry
ISBN 0-939010-89-5 (paper) $14.00
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5¼ x 9¼
88 pages [Bilingual Chinese/English]

Steve Bradbury's work has set a new standard for the translation of Chinese poetry, a development long overdue.
—Andrea Lingenfelter

Shang Qin is one of the most original and powerful Chinese poets, not only in our time but in the entire history of modern Chinese poetry.
—Michelle Yeh

Small in quantity but consummate in substance, Shang Qin's poetry epitomizes the doubts and values of the individual during an era of upheaval. In a poetic diction approaching that of speech, he exposed poetry's cutting edge and set the highest possible standard for subsequent poets. Even today we find his work an unflagging incentive to refresh our sensibilities and divest our language of artifice, which is poetry's true measure.
—Hung Hung

Shang Qin was born in Sichuan, China in 1930, but has lived in Taiwan since the late Forties. The author of four volumes of poetry, he is among the first poets in Taiwan to have expressed a significant interest in surrealism.

He began publishing poetry in the mid-Fifties in various modernist journals such as Modern Poetry Quarterly while still employed as a soldier. He was not discharged from the military until 1968 and spent the next two years attending the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa before returning to Taiwan, where he tried his hand at a host of trades from street vendor and gardener to bookstore clerk and editor. He eventually became associate chief-editor of the China Times Weekly and retired in 1992.

Shang Qin's reputation as a prose poet was slow in maturing and did not really take wing until the appearance of his first volume of poetry Dream or the Dawn, which he published the year he left for Iowa. In the mid-Thirties, when the island was still under Japanese colonial rule and Taiwan's poets looked to Japan rather than to China for poetic inspiration, a few aspiring modernists who had studied in the “Empire of the Sun” and wrote in the Japanese language, briefly experimented with prose poetry, which had been in vogue in Japan since the early Twenties. In the Forties and early Fifties, after Taiwan once again came under Chinese political and cultural influence, a handful of poets began writing prose poems in Chinese.

Although most critics describe Shang Qin as a surrealist poet, this attribution is somewhat problematic. To be sure, surrealism has had considerable influence on the poet's work. Much of his early poetry has that eerie “dream logic” associated with surrealism, and several of his poems were clearly inspired by seminal works in the European surrealist tradition, as seen in the poem “My Amoeba Kid Brother,” which directly alludes to and plays off of Joan Miró's celebrated 1926 painting “Dog Barking at the Moon,” and the more recent “Moonlight,” which is awash with allusions to Max Jacob's prose poem “The Truly Miraculous.” At the same time, one cannot help noting that, in the mid-Eighties, when the Nationalist Government began relaxing its surveillance of the nation's writers in anticipation of the end of martial law, much of Shang Qin's surrealism falls from the bone, so to speak. Which suggests that surrealism may have been a political cover for a poet of compassion and social justice.

The purpose of the present volume is to showcase the quality of the poet's work in this particular genre rather than to present a comprehensive survey of his oeuvre.

Jupiter

Near the stove by the window over there, on the far side of the tumbling earth, the sky is the eye of a forlorn mother. The clouds have become inflamed. A garden hoe breaks into dance with the sound of a startled bird bolting from a hot skillet. Likewise, a child experiences a growth spurt. And the creature that just awoke from the dream of an afternoon and is now twirling in circles in the fruitless effort to bite its own tail is both a yellow dog and the planet Jupiter.

My Amoeba Kid Brother

After Joan Miró's “Dog Barking at the Moon”

The angry little fellow plucking at my khaki shirttail as I barrel down the stairs is my amoeba kid-brother, whose invitation I only managed to put off after endless hemming and hawing. The boy is an absolute beast, a dog barking at the moon. The scruff of his neck whines, “How come you never wanna come up to my place? You saw the ladder, look how long and narrow it is. You got a nest of your own in town like this, with stars?”

Weird how anyone could have a kid brother like that, “clean and dirty at the same time.” Like a hand or the paw of a raccoon. I bet the underside of that paw is the spitting image of a pangolin's front footpad. So a guy has an amoeba kid-brother who simultaneously resembles a raccoon and a pangolin, while I throw scores of shadows on the midnight streets.

Steve Bradbury teaches at National Central University in Taipei, Taiwan. Besides Fusion Kitsch (Zephyr 2001), he is the translator of The Prison Diary of Ho Chi Minh (Tinfish Press 2003).

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THE FORGOTTEN KEYS
Tomasz Różycki
From the Polish by Mira Rosenthal
Poetry
ISBN 0-939010-92-5 (paper) $14.95
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6 x 8
128 pages [bilingual Polish/English]

“Personal” for Różycki means also transpersonal; the persona of his poetry holds the memory of an entire family or tribe, or perhaps even of society in general. And there's no mockery here. Różycki's poetry is serious, a private response to the historic moment. Without a doubt, a vital new poet has emerged from the Polish language.
—Adam Zagajewski

Tomasz Różycki belongs to a group of outstanding younger poets from Silesia, a region in Poland that bears the mark of a distinct mixture of cultures. Many families were relocated to the region in a forced migration after World War II, and shifting borders have likewise added influences from Germany and other neighboring countries. Through translations of a selection of poems from Różycki's five collections of poetry in Polish, as well as a critical introduction, The Forgotten Keys acquaints readers with a distinctive and formidable Polish writer. Unlike other contemporary Polish poets who clearly reject the heavy historicism of Czesław Miłosz and Zbigniew Herbert, Różycki claims such influence, exploring both personal and collective memory.

The translator Mira Rosenthal is a poet and founding editor of Lyric Poetry Review. She has been a Fulbright Fellow to Poland and selected and edited a special issue of Lyric on new Polish poetry in translation. Her work has appeared in the journals Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and Notre Dame Review, among others.

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ANXIETY OF WORDS: CONTEMPORARY POETRY
BY KOREAN WOMEN
Ch'oe Sung-ja, Kim Hyesoon, Yi Yon-ju
From the Korean by Don Mee Choi
Poetry
ISBN 0-939010-87-9 (paper) $16.00
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6 x 9
200 pages [Bilingual Korean/English]

Don Mee Choi, a fine poet herself, has translated both the spirit and words of these outsiders and experimenters into poetry that is just as striking to English-speakers as it was to Koreans under the dictatorship of Park Chung Hee when it was first written. Anxiety of Words has widened the conversation of Korean poetry to include the voice of Korean women—a voice that needs to be heard.
—American Poet, Spring 2007

Anxiety of Words is the first anthology of Korean women's poetry that challenges one of Korea's most enduring literary traditions: that “yoryu” (female) poetry must be gentle and subservient. By using innovative language, and vividly depicting women's lives and struggles within an often repressive society, these three contemporary poets defiantly insist that poetry can be part of social change—indeed, that it must be. Ch'oe Sung-ja, Kim Hyesoon, and Yi Yon-ju have written unforgettable poems that now, thanks to Don Mee Choi's translations, are available to English-speaking readers for the first time. With a lengthy introduction on the history of women's poetry in Korea, and biographical notes on the three poets, this volume is an eye-opening exploration for any reader interested in Korea, poetry, and contemporary women's literature.

These are pioneering translations of three women who are themselves pioneers in a patriarchal literary culture. In bringing these remarkable poems to life in English, Don Mee Choi is breaking down lingering barriers to writing women in Korea. This poetry has long cried out for an audience within and without Korea, and now it will finally receive the hearing it deserves.
—Bruce Fulton, Young-Bin Min Chair in Korean Literature and Literary Translation, University of British Columbia

In Anxiety of Words Don Mee Choi shatters the barrier between West and East to bring us the defiant, vulnerable and intellectually fierce collective voice of Korean women poets. In this historic anthology of work heretofore unavailable in English, Choi gives us access to dynamic and unforgettable poems. This book is a must-read for lovers of literature and for anyone who wants to hear complex truths from women in struggle with their globalizing world.
—Minnie Bruce Pratt

Ch'oe Sung-ja (b. 1952) is one of the most highly regarded contemporary women poets of South Korea. Ch'oe studied German literature at Korea University at a time when there were only two hundred women enrolled in the entire university. She began writing poetry while in college and became the first woman editor of Korea University's literary journal. In 1979, Ch'oe became the first woman poet to be published in a literary journal, Literature and Intellect. Ch'oe's poetry, which violated the criteria of decorum that had been long imposed on women poets, caused a stir in South Korea's predominantly male literary establishment. Ch'oe is part of the new wave of feminist poets of Korea to merge after the early pioneering women poets of the 1920s and 30s, who explored and gave voice to women's lives under the oppressive patriarchy. Ch'oe published four collections of poetry between 1981 and 1993. In 1994, she participated in the Iowa International Writers' Program. She now works as a literary translator in Seoul, and is translating a collection of short stories by J.D. Salinger.

Kim Hyesoon's (b. 1955) poetry first appeared in Literature and Intellect, the same journal in which Ch'oe's work also made its debut. Kim majored in Korean literature for her undergraduate and graduate degrees. She is a member of Another Culture, an organization which emerged in the 1980s and has played a critical role in feminist literary research and publication, including the development of women's studies in South Korea. Kim teaches creative writing and Korean poetry at Seoul College of Arts. In 2001, Kim received the So-wol Poetry Award. Her book of poetry, Seoul, My Upanishad (Munhak kwa jisongsa, 1994) was awarded the Kim Su-yong Contemporary Poetry Award in 2000. Kim is the first woman to receive this coveted award. In her work she explores women's multiple and simultaneous existence as grandmothers, mothers, daughters, and lovers. Kim Hyesoon has published seven collections of poetry; her most recent publication is a collection of critical essays about women and writing.

Yi Yon-ju made her literary debut in a journal called World of Writers (1991). The same year, Yi's first book of poetry, A Night Market Where There Are Prostitutes, was published by Sekyesa, a well-known literary press in South Korea. Yi's second collection of poems was published in 1993 after her death. According to the renowned feminist critic Kim Chong-nan, Yi's poetry has a critical place in the poetry of the 1980s. Yi depicts in her poetry women who live on the fringes of South Korean society, marginalized by the rapid industrialization of the 1970s and 80s, which, in part, was made possible by the exploitation of young women from poor rural areas. Not much is known about Yi's life. According to her brother, Yi Yong-ju, the night Yi committed suicide she had asked him not to reveal anything about her life except for her date and place of birth.

Don Mee Choi is a translator and scholar of Korean literature. Her literary focus is on the exploration of the cultural, historical, and political roles of contemporary Korean women's poetry and the critical examination of literary translation in the context of South Korea's post-coloniality. She currently lives in Seattle, Washington.