Dozing at Middle Age
Rent from DeepDyve- Dozing at Middle Age
a side wind scratches the sun and skydisturbing fifty-year-old dust
layered by thin air, even by fortune'sport window, I still hear your rasping cough
chin up, don't slouchyour wings expand with the sky, the feathers stir
in the distance, a whale, pregnant, not old butfrail too soon, the tenth month, no strength yet to bear
her labored journeys … fills this sky, deep as the seawith smoke and nightmares. [End Page 171]
Zhang Qinghua 张清华 is the executive director of the International Writing Center at Beijing Normal University. His honors include the 2010 Critics Award of the annual Chinese Literature Awards from the Southern Media Group. His books include the anthologies Thirty Years of Avant-garde Poetry in China 1979–2009 and Mapping the Independent Poetry in China.
Gregory Pardlo is the author of Totem (2007), winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize; and Digest (2014), winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017. He is poetry editor for Virginia Quarterly Review and teaches in the MFA program at Rutgers University. He lives in Brooklyn.
Henry Zhang 张晴 grew up in the U.S. and is a graduate student in the Department of Chinese Literature at Beijing Normal University. He participated in several international translation workshops at Beijing Normal University and is a recipient of the 2017 Henry Luce Translation Fellowship in the U.S.
