In this Book

I Can Almost See The Clouds of Dust: Selected Poetry of Yu Xiang

Book
Translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain
2013
Published by: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press
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Yu Xiang comfortably inhabits the negative space between viewer and subject, artist and artwork, the lover and her beloved in this acrobatic, ekphrastic, meditatively-compelling collection. Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s crisp translation invites American readers to experience Yu Xiang’s poetic mastery half a world away from its formative origins in the Shandong province, bringing into focus the voice of one of China’s most celebrated and memorable female voices. “I have a lonely yet / stable life,” Yu admits at one point in the book. “This is my house. If / you happen to walk in, it’s certainly not / for my rambling notes.” Yu Xiang disarms her reader with exacting imagery and pathos in order to tell the aching, unavoidable truth of womanhood in these striking poems. —Dorianne Laux

Table of Contents

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Title Page, Copyright Page

pp. 1-4

Contents

pp. v-viii

Foreward: My Children Will Return Me to Solitude

pp. ix-xvi

I . You’re Simply Chez Moi

pp. 1-18

II. This Person Is Vanishing

pp. 19-36

III. Hanging in Mid-Air, My Heart Does not Fall

pp. 37-52

IV. With a Nose That Always Points Straight Ahead

pp. 53-68

V. The Rotten and the Fresh, Both Can’t Live Anew

pp. 69-78

VI. Now I Plan to Retire, As a Harmless Everyman

pp. 79-86

VII. Our Body Shapes Stick Together

pp. 87-108

VIII. A Severed Finger That Performs for Dead Spirits

pp. 109-124

IX. Kept for Oneself

pp. 125-134

X. If I Can Indeed Have a Background

pp. 135-150

Notes

pp. 151-152
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