MCLC: Xue Di Across Borders

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Xue Di Across Borders
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List members might be interested in this new publication, a bilingual
edition of Xue Di's Across Borders, translated by Alison Friedman.

Kirk 

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Across Borders
By Xue Di
A bi-lingual edition, translated from the Chinese, with a Preface and
Afterword by Alison Friedman
Green Integer Series No.: 204
ISBN: 978-1-55713-423-3, Pages: 143

Buy a downloadable PDF file
<http://www.greeninteger.com/book-digital.cfm?-xue-di-across-borders-&BookI
D=335>

The Chinese poet Xue Di came to the United States immediately after the
Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989 in Beijing, becoming writer-in-residence
at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and was a fellow in
Brown's Freedom to Write Program.

Born in Beijing in 1957, Xue Di is the author of three volumes of
collected works and one book of criticism on contemporary poetry in
Chinese. In English translation, he has published three full-length books,
Another Kind of Tenderness, An Ordinary Day, and Heart into Soil. He has
also published four chapbooks, as well as publishing poetry in numerous
American journals and anthologies as well as being translated into several
other languages.

In his newest book, Across Borders, Xue Di writes marvelously rich prose
poems on a large variety of "things"--in the sense of the French poet
Francis Ponge's Le Parti pris des choses--both specific and abstract. From
highly poetic confrontations with "Shadow," "Music," and "Bubbles," the
poet faces very specific and contemporary concerns such as an "Eatery," a
"Gift," and a longer work on "Blue White Water."

Xue Di's work literally shimmers with dream-like detail as he struggles
with the world around him: "Flustered, I start to look for a place to
murder my shadow" ("Shadow") or "On Main Street fingertips grab at each
other. Finger nails' / faces venomously drop to the ground" ("Images"). In
the works of Across Borders it is as if the poet was tactilely
experiencing everything about him, resulting in emotional and temporary
instability. In his very honest expression of his fears and terrors,
however, Xue Di reaches out to all of us: "I weep. My poems grasp for
others like me--if but to hold them."

What the poet has said of his earlier book, Heart into Soil, is equally
true for this powerful new collection: "It is about understanding a
journey of my inner life, covered by daily details, and layers of emotion,
a record of visioning outwards--in contrast to when I lived in a communist
society and was visioning inwards--as I live [now] in a free country. It
is about understanding the connections and knots within a man in relation
to societies and time."