River Merchant's Wife

About this book

Poetry. Asian American Studies. Translated from Chinese by Tony Barnstone, Neil Aitken, Afaa Weaver, Katie Farris, and Sylvia Burn with the author. "The world that Ming Di constructs in RIVER MERCHANT'S WIFE is a richly complex one, operating in a twilight of loss and discovery and bounded by history and legend. She works around multiple themes, often creating tension between seemingly disparate elements, as they settle into unexpected orbits or descend along unusual trajectories. Her work is surreal at times, a tableau of mythic dimensions. Always there is transformation and reinvention. She forces a reconsideration of the tropes and conventions of sexuality and gender, nationality and citizenship, displacement and exile, and love and aesthetic beauty. It is a world populated by the ghosts of composers and artists, their presences haunting the margins of the poems, while a personal narrative threads its way through, donning masks and adopting voices, reconfiguring the spaces and characters of each moment to reveal what always seems unsayable and unknown"—Neil Aitken, from his Introduction "These poems (by Ming Di) show a distinct sensibility. They are intimate, fresh, and translucent. This remarkable volume illustrates the poet's wide range and unique art."—Ha Jin "I was surprised by Ming Di's repertoire of poems—so lyrical, so intense, so learned in their associations. Erotic, deep images on the move, but nothing static as they flow into a sensual music—unlike the quirky leaps of Bly's imagery, worlds cohere, and the East is West and the West is East and the twain does meet and breeds throughout so many of the poems in this marvelous collection."—Kerry Shawn Keys