Decapitated Poetry by Colin Bramwell, Ko Hua Chen and translated by Wen-Chi Li

This is poetry from Taiwan.

Decapitated Poetry by Colin Bramwell, Ko Hua Chen translated by Wen-Chi Li is published by Seagull Books. This is a Book originally written in Taiwanese. This was published in 2023.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781803091648E12.

Decapitated Poetry, credited here to Colin Bramwell and Ko Hua Chen and translated by Wen-Chi Li, should be handled as a collaborative or multi-author Taiwanese entry rather than forced into a clean single-author frame. The title has a deliberately violent theatricality to it, suggesting poems interested in rupture, severed speech, and the strange afterlife of language once the head of meaning has been removed. What I like about an entry like this is that it resists the safe language of introduction. It asks the reader to expect disturbance and formal oddness. As a Taiwanese work in translation, it widens the shelf toward collaboration, experiment, and cross-linguistic friction, where poetry becomes less a finished object than a charged encounter between voices.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.