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Tag Archives: poetry

Of Rare Compatibility”: Jen Bervin’s Silk Poems and Making Kin in the Sericene in The Journal of Foreign Languages

I’m pleased to see my article on Jen Bervin’s Silk Poems and the Anthropocene appear in JFLC. Thanks go out to editor Lauri Scheyer in particular. The paper can be downloaded here and here. Abstract: Scripting what may be read as a “string figure” companion to Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene, Jen Bervin’s 2017 Silk Poems project becomes […]

What is [urban] poetry now without photography? With photos as cheap [we’d like to think] as words [are we mistaken] why not just [also] take a picture? (Post-Personism?)

  All things Anthropocene. All things, that is, marked by language — this word, Anthropocene, in particular, in this instance — by the inadequacies of language to do more than whatever it might be doing in the moment of its activation in embodied mind (in the human brain). Poetry goes way back: representation pushed to limits beyond “mere” representation, the attempt […]

Han Bo’s “Chinese Eastern Railway” | 韩博《中东铁路》

My translation of Shanghai-based poet Han Bo’s nine-poem cycle 《中东铁路》 is up at the Berlin-based lyrikline, accompanying German translations by Daniel Bayerstorfer, Peiyao Chang and Lea Schneider. The poems are densely allusive, experimental and rooted in the complex layered history of the historic Chinese Eastern Railway running through Manchuria (contemporary Dongbei and Inner Mongolia and, in particular, the […]

Old poems, new place, good times

Three Shanghai poems from Expat Taxes, originally published in various editions of Larry Fagin’s Sal Mimeo, are up at Alluvium, the house publication of Literary Shanghai. Plus one they like because it has the word “alluvial” in it, previously published in the Brooklyn Rail, as a li’l promo salvo in advance of the reading event at […]

Soft focus, soft censorship, self-censorship: “Poetry,” “China,” and Biz Journo Expats

As much of a pleasure as it was to appear at the Shanghai International Literary Festival with Jen Bervin, Jen Hyde and Wen Jin, it was one mixed — as is always the case for me here in Shanghai — with significant measures of the odd and the off. Don’t get me wrong: One of the things I like about life in […]

Shanghai International Literary Festival appearances

    I’ll be reading and speaking at two SILF events. First, Saturday 11 March at 2pm, with Austin Woerner and Nina Powles, I’ll be reading a few poems and previewing the Thursday 16 6pm reading and panel discussion with Jen Bervin, Wen Jin and Jen Hyde. Thursday’s event has been long in the making, bringing […]

The Verses” and “What’s an Expat”

Richard Roundy continues to publish some of my long-time — and newly — favorite poets as poetry editor of the young webzine Across the Margin, and I’m grateful to join poets from Kit Robinson and Alan Bernheimer to Allison Cobb to Aaron Simon to Lewis Warsh and Paul Maziar, just to name a very few, with the second of two sets of […]

Expat Taxes

Expat Taxes is officially out and available on Amazon and via Seaweed Salad Editions. The book collects poems written over the past decade of living in Shanghai and is anchored by the long poem “Hello 2015” (a chunk of which The Brooklyn Rail published last April). The original plan was to publish “Hello” as a chapbook, but we […]