Zephyr Press – serie

In this debut collection in English, one of the most famous poets of the Sinosphere offers biting musings on politics, ideologies, and mortality. Yang Xiaobin is a household name in both Chinese and Taiwanese poetry circles. He was part of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, and after the government crackdown, left for graduate school in America. While in the US, he began a prolific career as a poet before moving to Taiwan, where he now lives, writes, and teaches. Several of the book’s poems satirize the use of “-ism” ideology, which was popular among Chinese intellectuals after the country opened up in 1978. Others come from his “Guidebook” series, offering “instructions” on different aspects of a rapidly commercializing lifestyle. While most of the poems are recent, the book will include some of his most representative and best-known older poems, without which no first collection could be complete. The volume includes a critical afterword by the translator.

Miklavž Komelj is one of Slovenia’s leading intellectuals—a poet, artist, writer, art historian, and translator—who shares his wide-ranging interests and probing mind in this second collection to appear in English. A voracious reader, he peppers his work with allusions from literature, mythology, and history, but his inspiration also comes from less likely places, like a literary tattoo on the wrist of a woman sitting near him on a bus. Here are love lyrics, political polemics, mystical verses, artistic and archival explorations, epigrammatic and philosophical poems, and long free verse experiments. With poems spanning thirty years of his career, Night Is More Abstract illuminates the breadth and richness of Komelj’s vision and his country. The book is bilingual on facing pages.

A successor to Korean feminist poets like Kim Hyesoon, Yi Won frequently writes about the perilousness of maintaining one’s human identity in a high-tech, digital environment. In this debut book in English, her poems range from avant-garde prose poems to more lyrical, if dark, free verse, as she examines isolation, death, and the passage of time — and in the process, upends polite society and Korean literary culture.