Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. Photography. A bilingual career-spanning selection of poems by Wang Yin, translated by Andrea L ingenfelter. With GHOSTS CITY SEA, Wang Yin and Lingenfelter have assembled three sets of poems written between 1987 and 2015 that showcase the depth and breadth of a cosmopolitan poet whose work ranges through his native Shanghai and outward to achieve a unique synthesis of influences and insights across cultures and eras, both Chinese and otherwise. This edition features a set of Wang Yin's photographs, documenting both his travels and Shanghai's contemporary art scene.
When Wang Yin looks at “three pines [growing] on a northern shore, he sees that they are “like hair under a barber’s constant scissors.” He spends “a summer day in the company of ghosts.” In “The Scent of Autumn,” he writes:
rain falls on my lips, spreads like disinfectant
across a newly poured asphalt road
Simultaneously intimate and visionary, and always brimming with feelings that cannot quite be named, these poems go beyond description. They are songs of praise haunted by feelings of isolation, disruption, and invisibility:
autumn’s withered hair falls
quietly into the recesses of a drawer
Reading Wang Yin’s poems, I found myself transported to a world animated by paradoxes — a place at once austere and lush, utterly strange and oddly familiar.
His photographs heightened these visceral perceptions, as I was convinced I could smell the rain falling hard around me, while I was standing lost on a dark, glistening street in an unknown city.
— JOHN YAU
In Wang Yin’s gorgeous poems, everything traverses, even “today’s heavy rain poured down last night.” This same rain “falls into tomorrow.” Weather, like time, space, history, and even the self, is never held in one place, is mutable. In poems with an occasional comma, no periods, and all lowercase in Andrea Lingenfelter’s translation, we see how form mirrors that fluid continuum. In these poems, everything is a ghost but there’s no origin of the apparitions. Even “tears are a chariot without a driver” and stillness “has lost its stillness.” Ultimately, Wang Yin’s stunning poems are paratactic breathless images, piling on one after another, recognizing our lack of agency during our brief tour on this earth, but not without hope as “we slowly reawaken.”
— VICTORIA CHANG
“I put myself inside the urn that held you,” Wang Yin writes, putting himself inside the book that you hold. Emotions in his poems are always connected to a vivid, starkly sensual world: “a rooftop shining with rain is the only letter that arrives.” It is the poignant clarity of his images, so memorably rendered by Andrea Lingenfelter, that makes his poems burn in your brain long after you close the book.
— FORREST GANDER
Wang Yin; born in Shanghai; emerged in the 1980s as one of a vital new generation of poets who pushed experimentation in new directions ; grounding work drawing inspiration from both avant-garde movements abroad and the possibilities inherent in the Chinese language in everyday experience. His selected poems were published in China in 2005; and his 2015 collection Limelight won...