Angelo Mao : part four

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

I recently read Jenny Qi’s Focal Point and Jackie Wang’s The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void, both of which I enjoyed. I sought out Focal Point in particular because Qi, like me, comes from an immigrant background and has a postgraduate degree in a science field. I was curious how those influences would inform her work.

A wonderful piece of poetry criticism I read recently is Xiaofei Tian’s essay on the 6th century poet Yu Xin. She describes how he dealt with personal trauma and displacement coinciding with the end of empire. I’ve always felt that trauma and displacement underlies much of the classical Chinese lyric tradition—from Du Fu to Li Qingzhao and others. To me, Tian’s approach recalls Helen Vendler’s in Breaking of Style. It’s an approach I feel is missing from literary analyses of Chinese lyrics in English, so I’m grateful Tian paid this kind of attention in her essay.