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In a radically new translation and interpretation of the I Ching, David Hinton strips this ancient Chinese masterwork of the usual apparatus and discovers a deeply poetic and philosophical text. Teasing out an elegant vision of the cosmos as ever-changing yet harmonious, Hinton reveals the seed from which Chinese philosophy, poetry, and painting grew. Although it was and is widely used for divination, the I Ching is also a book of poetic philosophy, deeply valued by artists and intellectuals, an...

This collection of Zen poems and essays guides readers towards the joy of life. In the 1,600 years that have elapsed since the arrival of Indian Buddhism in China during the Han and Jin dynasties, Buddhist monks and scholars have integrated the essence of Zen Buddhist thought with the classical forms of Chinese literature to create over 30,000 simple, lively poems of deep moral significance. Their authors convey an understanding of Zen, of its practice, or of the knowledge gained through medita...

Crossfire collects Staceyann Chin's empowering, feminist-LGBTQ-Caribbean, activist-driven poetry for the first time in a single book. According to The New York Times, Chin is "sassy, rageful and sometimes softly self-mocking." The Advocate says that her poems, "combine hilarious one-liners with a refusal to conform" and note "Chin is out to confront more than just the straight world."

Claimed by some to have been compiled by Confucius in the 5th century BCE, the Book of Songs is an ancient anthology of Chinese poetry. Collecting poems over a number of centuries, the anthology - sometimes known as the Classic of Poetry (or Shi-jing) - is the oldest existing collection of Chinese poetry, comprising 305 works dating from the 11th to 7th centuries BCE. Some poems are shorter lyrics in simple language that are folk songs which record the voice of the common people, addressing love...

Leung Ping?kwan is one of Hong Kong's most acclaimed poets. His poems display a unique blend of the literary and the down?to?earth, the modern and the traditional, the serious and the humorous, the local and the universal. He wrote, 'I want to write a kind of modern poetry that does not have to turn away from the world we live in, that rethinks the relationship between language and objects...' This collection has been carefully curated, and is arranged under ten thematic sections: Lotus Leaves,...

Finalist, Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism Ezra Pound's Cathay (1915) is a masterpiece both of modernism and of world literature. The muscular precision of images that mark Pound's translations helped establish a modern style for American literature, at the same time creating a thirst for classical Chinese poetry in English. Pound's dynamic free-verse translations in a modern idiom formed the basis for T.S. Eliot's famous claim that Pound was the "inventor of Chinese poetry for our time." Yet...

In a formative period of Chinese culture, early medieval writers made extensive use of a diverse set of resources, in which such major philosophical classics as Laozi, Zhuangzi, and Classic of Changes featured prominently. Reading Philosophy, Writing Poetry examines how these writers understood and manipulated a shared intellectual lexicon to produce meaning. Focusing on works by some of the most important and innovative poets of the period, this book explores intertextuality-the transference, a...

The most comprehensive collection of modern Chinese poetry in English translation available todayThis volume—a completely overhauled and updated version of Michelle Yeh’s 1992 classic Anthology of Modern Chinese Poetry—brings together modern poetry from the Chinese-speaking world dating from the 1910s to the 2010s. Featuring the work of 85 poets from mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore, it contains more than 280 poems that span the entire history of modern Chinese poetry....

This bilingual posthumous collection is a detailed, retrospective look at one of the more brilliant poetic minds of the twenty-first century, and includes an introduction by Bai Hua and afterword by Bei Dao. Zhang Zao left China in 1986 and lived in Germany until his death at 48 in 2010; only about 90 of his poems survive. A dark humor vivifies Zhang Zao’s later work as he eroticizes the harrowing: doubt, finality, and then nothingness. The choice of these poems span his short career: "Mirror,"...

Sidetracks, Bei Dao’s first new collection in almost fifteen years, is also the poet’s first long poem and his magnum opus—the artistic culmination of a lifetime devoted to the renewal and reinvention of language. “As a poet, I am always lost,” Bei Dao once said. Opening with a prologue of heavenly questions and followed by thirty-four cantos, Sidetracks travels forward and backward along the divergent paths of the poet’s wandering life—from his time as a Young Pioneer in Beijing, through the ye...