The Death Issue in Our Place
- The Death Issue in Our Place
Our place is a vast countrysidewhere crops, men and women growas well as their livestock.
In our place, many women commit suicide.Some drink pesticide, some hang themselves.Most of them choose to drink pesticide.In our place, we don't call that "commit suicide."We say "drink pesticide till death."
Sometimes I admire the women who drink pesticide.They, really unafraid of death,move from "want to die" to "die"without a moment's thought.They simply die.
Sometimes I admire the women who hang themselves.They, who really understand the death issue,have made up their minds to diebefore hanging themselves.In our place, we don't call that "commit suicide" either.We say "hang themselves till death."
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Shen Haobo, born in 1976, is considered one of the most controversial voices among the new generation of Chinese poets for being both wickedly erotic and politically satirical in his poetry. His first collection, Great Evil in the Heart (2004), was banned, and he went abroad for a few months to escape arrest. As the leading poet of the Lower Body Group, he is the author of four poetry collections. He is currently based in Beijing, running his own publishing company, Xiron.
Liang Yujing grew up in China and is currently a PhD candidate at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. His poems and translations have appeared in a number of magazines across the world, including Modern Poetry in Translation, the Poetry Review, Boston Review and the Massachusetts Review. He is the Chinese translator of Best New Zealand Poems 2014 (2016) and the English translator of Zero Distance: New Poetry from China (2017).
