Empty Chairs by Xia Liu and translated by Ming Di, Jennifer Stern

This is poetry from China.

Empty Chairs by Xia Liu translated by Ming Di, Jennifer Stern is published by Graywolf Press. This is a Book originally written in Chinese. This was published in 2015.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781555977252E12.

Empty Chairs, by Xia Liu and translated by Ming Di, Jennifer Stern from Chinese, brings Chinese-language poetry from China into English through Liu Xia’s Chinese prison-adjacent lyric, absence, and the empty chair as public symbol and private ache. The metadata gives the reader a doorway, but the real value is what happens once the poem starts making its own weather. I would read it for chairs, absence, prison, and the way a missing body can fill a room with accusation, not as a fixed lesson about China. The best entry point is still the poem itself: the line that catches, the image that refuses to explain itself, the feeling that arrives before paraphrase. Empty Chairs belongs in the translated poetry library because it belongs as contemporary Chinese poetry of witness, love, and political disappearance.

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.