THE CHANGING ROOM
Zhai Yongming
From the Chinese by Andrea Lingenfelter
poetry
ISBN 978-0-9815521-3-2 (paper) $15
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6 x 8
163 pages [bilingual Chinese/English]

Zhai Yongming is one of China’s leading poets, and this bilingual selection from major poems across decades demonstrates why. Beautifully translated by Andrea Lingenfelter, Zhai’s poetry is sensuous, mysterious, provocative, gritty, and her singular black night consciousness shines through.
—Arthur Sze

Powerful as a tremor in the Sichuan Basin, the poetic voice we hear in The Changing Room is a touching, elegant, often ironic, testimony of being Chinese and being a Chinese woman.
—Yunte Huang, author of Charlie Chan

While Zhai Yongming’s poems from the 1980s owed much to Anglophone Confessional poets, even then Zhai’s voice was unmistakably her own. With imagery dominated by night, darkness, blood, sex, and death, those early poems also directly engaged traditional Chinese cultural paradigms. Zhai’s recasting of Chinese yin and yang cosmology along feminist lines was a dominant thread in a body of work that was otherwise intensely personal and contemporary. Over time, she has continued to go back to China’s literary and historical past, using it as a source of inspiration, as a counterpoint to modern experience, and as part of an ongoing dialogue with patriarchal Confucian historiography.
—from the Translator’s Foreword by Andrea Lingenfelter

The author of six volumes of poetry, Zhai Yongming first became prominent in the mid-1980s with the publication of her twenty-poem cycle, “Woman,” a work that forcefully articulated a female point-of-view in China’s largely patriarchal society. Her powerful imagery and forthright voice resonated with many readers. Zhai has continued to hone her critique of traditional attitudes towards women, quickly becoming one of China’s foremost feminist voices and a major force in the contemporary literary scene. She is also an installation artist and prolific essayist, and stages poetry readings and other cultural events at the bar she owns in her native Chengdu.

Andrea Lingenfelter received her MA from Yale University and her PhD from the University of Washington. She is also the translator of the novels, Candy (Back Bay, 2003), Farewell to My Concubine (W. Morrow, 1993), and The Last Princess of Manchuria (Morrow, 1992). Lingenfelter currently lives in Berkeley.

BLACK SQUARE
Tadeusz Dąbrowski
From the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Poetry
ISBN 978-0-9815521-6-3 (paper) $15.00
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6 x 8
120 pages [Bilingual Polish/English]

Restlessly inventive, sharp-witted, and intent on raising mischief, the poems in Black Square are so much fun to read, it’s almost easy to overlook how deeply serious they are—and how dark. Dąbrowski is part life of the party, part heavy-hearted metaphysician, and he plays his two sides off each other like an expert comedy team with a knack for aphorism and philosophical speculation. “Nothing would be bearable if I weren’t / endlessly somebody else,” he writes, embracing the ever-changing nature of identity—and leaving us thankful he remained himself long enough to complete this brilliant, unforgettable book.
— Timothy Donnelly

Tadeusz Dąbrowski is writing his self-portrait of the artist as a young man. Love, faith and doubt fill its pages. The first chapters of this work in progress are promising, we’ll be looking forward to the se
— Adam Zagajewski

It is hard to define Dąbrowski’s poetry with utter certainty, to say whether its subject has or has not reconciled himself with God—whose authority is never put in question—or what his moral choices are. This is a poetry that complicates matters, that refuses to provide answers, that constructs small treatises in completely unpredictable places—an existence en brut, always becoming, always variable and resistant to definition. This is a poetry that smelts its inheritance into something new, modern, and original, something dynamic, paradoxical, constantly in motion, a poetry that is engaged with today’s world in so many of its manifestations, leaping from theme to theme—art, travel, sex, love (presented in all its succulence, no doubt, and with complete candor, as if this most fragile of human affairs was the only constant in life), computers, camera lenses, Europe, America, quotations from philosophers, and rock lyrics—in its ambitious gambit to comprehend a world that remains elusive and undescribed.
—from the Introduction by Tomasz Różycki

Tadeusz Dabrowski was born in northern Poland in 1979. From his first volume, published in 1999, he has been critically acclaimed for poetry that combines a tone of metaphysical meditation with the theme of love. His poems are like snapshots taken by a sensitive camera that captures moments filled with the “caring absence” of God and intimacy with the woman the poet loves. Here we find gravity laced with humor and sublimity mixed with pleasure. So far Dabrowski has published five volumes of poetry in his native Poland, which have won him numerous awards. His work has appeared in translation in thirteen European languages. English translations of his poems by Antonia Lloyd-Jones have been published in several leading literary journals, including Agni, American Poetry Review, and Tin House. Black Square is his first collection to be published in English.

Antonia Lloyd-Jones is a translator of Polish literature. In 2008 she won the Found in Translation Award for her translation of The Last Supper, a novel by Pawel Huelle. Her other translations of fiction include works by Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz and Olga Tokarczuk. Her translations of poetry by Jacek Dehnel appeared in a recent anthology, Six Polish Poets, published by Arc Publications.

APPROACHING YOU IN ENGLISH
Admiel Kosman
From the Hebrew by Lisa Katz with Shlomit Naim-Naor
Poetry
ISBN 978-0-9815521-4-9 (trade paper) $15 US/ $17 CAN
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6 x 8
128 pages [bilingual Hebrew/English]
Available: October 2011

Admiel Kosman’s poetry gives voice to everyone who has ever felt the passions of love or guilt, piety or sinfulness. His language is suffused with a biblical presence, an awareness of history, and profound sensitivity to the conflicts of our inner life. God and the Bible are palpable in his words; he is one of Israel’s most talented poets.
—Susannah Heschel, Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies, Dartmouth College

Admiel Kosman's first book to appear in English draws from all nine of his books of poetry that have been published in Hebrew, as well as new, unpublished work. His poems explore multiple tensions — between prayer and modern life, sacred texts and eroticism, language and translation, gender and identity — while also resisting the very nature of such categorizations. Approaching You in English includes an introduction by translator Lisa Katz that quotes extensively from an interview with Kosman, and an afterword by Shlomit Naim-Naor that explores some of the gender issues in his poetry.

In addition to his poetry, Admiel Kosman has published three scholarly volumes on gender and sexuality in traditional Jewish texts. Raised in an Orthodox home, he studied art at the Bezalel Art Academy in Jerusalem, and later received a Ph.D. in Talmud from Bar-Ilan University. He teaches religious and Jewish studies at Potsdam University in Berlin, and serves as academic director of the Abraham Geiger Reform Seminary, the first Reform rabbinical college to open in Germany since the Holocaust.

Lisa Katz is the author of Reconstruction (Am Oved), and the translator of Look There: New and Selected Poems of Agi Mishol (Graywolf). Her poems, translations, essays and reviews have appeared in numerous publications; she works as a translator for the English edition of the Israeli daily, Haaretz. In 2008, she won the Mississippi Review Poetry Prize.

Shlomit Naim-Naor is the deputy director of Melitz, an educational organization in Jerusalem, and an international speaker on Israeli poetry, literature and Jewish texts. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from Ben Gurion University and a BA in Philosophy and Literature from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She has written extensively about Kosman's poetry.

SNOW PLAIN
Duo Duo
From the Chinese by John Crespi
Fiction
ISBN 978-0-9815521-8-7 (paper) $17.00
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5½ x 7½
126 pages

Duo Duo’s long-awaited first book of prose to appear in English continues to explore issues of exile and alienation that permeate his poetry. An ambiguous first-person narrator, perhaps the same voice and perhaps not, links the six stories, each of which raises questions about the mutability of location, self, reality and experience. As John Crespi writes in the introduction, “For Duo Duo, storytelling seems reserving the right to search for, but still deny, an illusion of wholeness when one’s existence is inevitably fragmented, to admit to being simultaneously where you are and where you are not, to locate the past in the present and the far in the near, and find fullness in the assertion that we ought never be completely sure just where the here and the now really are.”

Born in Beijing in 1951, Duo Duo (pen name of Li Shizheng) began writing poetry in the 1970s. During the Cultural Revolution, angry Chinese officials branded him as one of the “Misty” poets, a derisive term referring to their obscure imagery and symbols. After witnessing the Tiananmen Square massacre on June 4, 1990, Duo Duo left the country for a reading in London, and lived in exile for the next 15 years. He now teaches at Hainan University. Duo Duo is the first Chinese author to win the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature. The biennial award has been called the “American Nobel Prize,” because 27 of the 40 winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature since 1970 have been laureates, candidates or jurors of the Neustadt Prize. Read more about Duo Duo and his poetry collection, The Boy Who Catches Wasps.

John Crespi is the Henry R. Luce Associate Professor of Chinese at Colgate University in Hamilton, NY. His book, Voices in Revolution: Poetry and the Auditory Imagination in Modern China, was published in 2009 (University of Hawai‘i Press). His translations of Chinese fiction, prose and poetry have appeared in a numerous anthologies and literary journals.

FLASH CARDS
Yu Jian
From the Chinese by Wang Ping & Ron Padgett
Poetry
ISBN 978-0-9815521-3-2 (trade paper) $15.00
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6 x 8
168 pages [bilingual Chinese/English]

Flash Cards is a primer of modern Chinese daily life—constructing a complex philosophical vision from swatches of daily events and observations. As Yu Jian has written about his own work, “It is possible to see eternity—to see everything—in a teacup or a candy wrapper. Everything in the world is poetry.”

Ron Padgett—a major poet whose sympathies are collegial and up for the resonant task— and native born Chinese poet Wang Ping have done an inspired job of transmitting this sharp-edged yet achingly poignant work. In their care, Yu Jian’s particular sensibility pierces through a dark age.
—Anne Waldman

Born in Yunnan province in 1954, Yu Jian contracted pneumonia at age two, which left him partially deaf in one ear. He once wrote, “it has made me accustomed to understanding the world through my eyes instead of talking with others. I have had to create ‘inner ear’ for myself.” He came to poetry early, first being exposed to classical Chinese poetry by his father, and then starting to write his own free verse at 20. While working in a factory during the Cultural Revolution, he became an avid reader and was deeply influenced by the poetry of Walt Whitman. He has cultivated a direct and simple style in his poetry, partly in opposition to the grand and often inflated language of Maoist-era poetry. Flash Cards is his first full collection to appear in English.

Ron Padgett is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and was named an Officer in the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government. He received the Shelley Memorial Award in 2009 from the Poetry Society of America. His translations include The Complete Poems of Blaise Cendrars.

Wang Ping is the author of several books, including two volumes of poetry (Of Flesh & Spirit and The Magic Whip), a novel, two collections of short stories, and the cultural study Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China. Her book of stories, The Last Communist Virgin, won the 2008 Minnesota Book Award and the 2007 Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies.

69
MLB (Milosz Biedrzycki)
From the Polish by Frank L. Vigoda
Poetry
ISBN 978-0-939010-99-8 (trade paper) $16.00
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6 x 8
208 pages [bilingual Polish/English

If you’re going to purchase one book of poetry this year, make it [MLB’s] latest collection, 69.
—Shaun Randol, The Mantle

MLB's extraordinary linguistic awareness and amused wonderment with language lurk beneath all his poetry. One of the principal authors of the "bruLion" generation, which has been influenced by American poets such as Frank O'Hara, Allen Ginsberg, and John Ashbery, MLB has published six volumes of poetry and received numerous prestigious literary prizes. Three of his volumes were inspired by the avant-garde and surrealist traditions, and presented the reader with riddle-poems to solve. The work in this bilingual edition is from his 2006 volume, 69, which encompasses his poetic output from the fall of Communism to the present, allowing the reader to trace the process of personal and artistic development during the rapidly changing post-Communist years.

MLB was born in 1967 in Slovenia, graduated with a degree in Geophysics at Krakow’s Academy of Mining and Metallurgy, and now divides his time between Krakow and the Middle East. In addition to his work as a geophysical engineer, he works on the editorial board of the quarterly, bruLion. English translations of his work have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Trafika, Chicago Review, Fence, Zoland Poetry, and the Zephyr Press anthology Carnivorous Boy Carnivorous Bird. (photo by Marta Eloy Cichocka)

Frank L. Vigoda’s translations, primarily from Polish, have appeared in a variety of publications, including Modern Poetry in Translation, Polin, Studies in Polish Jewry, Lyric Poetry Review, Chicago Review, Absinthe: New European Writing, Circumference, and Fence. Long-time translation projects include the work of Aleksander Wat, Rafal Wojaczek, Urke Nachalnik, and two young Polish poets, Marcin Jagodzinski and Kamil Zajac.