Yang Xiaobin is a household name in Chinese and Taiwanese poetry circles, and in this debut collection in English, he offers biting musings on politics, ideologies, and mortality. He was part of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, and after the government crackdown, left for graduate school in America. While in the US, he began a prolific career as a poet before moving to Taiwan, where he now lives, writes, and teaches.
Several of the book’s poems satirize the use of “-ism” ideology, which was popular among Chinese intellectuals after the country opened up in 1978. Others come from his “Guidebook” series, offering “instructions” on different aspects of a rapidly commercializing lifestyle. While most of the poems are recent, the book will include some of his most representative and best-known older poems, without which no first collection could be complete. The volume includes a critical introduction by translator Canaan Morse.
A poet, scholar, and a photographer, Yang Xiaobin was born in Shanghai, China. He earned a Ph.D. in Chinese Literature from Yale University and taught at the University of Mississippi for many years before accepting a position at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan. Widely recognized as one of the most important Chinese-language poets of the last thirty years, Yang has published several collections in China including Through the Sun Belt, Scenery and Plot, To the Sea’s Nest, and Showering Lessons. His poetry invokes postmodernism as satirical power and attempts to articulate the genuine through verbal play.
Canaan Morse is a translator, poet, and scholar of premodern Chinese literature and oral performance. An original member of the Chinese literary translation collective Paper Republic, he has published translations of contemporary Chinese poetry and prose in multiple international journals. His latest two translations, both of novels by Ge Fei and published in the NYRB Classics Series, have respectively won the Susan Sontag Prize for Translation and been named Finalist for a National Book Award.
