Orange Tree

Dong Li is a multilingual author who translates from Chinese, English, French, and German. Born and raised in China, he was educated at Deep Springs College and Brown University. His poems have been published in Conjunctions, Fence, Kenyon Review, POETRY, Poetry Daily, and many others.

"Li’s method of blurring the distinction between singular and plural is in perpetual service to the book’s tone, one I can best describe as strange, mournful, and obliquely beautiful. . . . Li is a sure-footed guide. The Orange Tree avoids the affective pitfalls of both the memoir and the chronicle, replacing the nostalgia of the former with a clipped aloofness, and countering the roteness of the latter with an insistent, unflinching imagism. . . . Li’s poems introduce the reader to a way of seeing that is not unlike his own approach to history, a reconciliation of individual and collective scales. With unsentimental conviction rather than didacticism, The Orange Tree restores dignity to those whose lives and deaths were forgotten, or worse, remembered falsely, turned into propaganda, patronized, or pitied. The stories of these lost ones may lack a preexisting language, but that does not mean they are untellable; no matter how faded a photograph is, our minds will still fill in the outlines."

• Foreword: Srikanth ReddyAviary of Water and FireThe Orange TreeLive, by LightningThe Army DreamerThe Maple BridgeGlossary: In Search of WordsAcknowledgments