Flash Cards by Yu Jian and translated by Ron Padgett, Wang Ping

This is poetry from China.

Flash Cards by Yu Jian translated by Ron Padgett, Wang Ping is published by Zephyr Press. This is a Book originally written in Chinese. This was published in 2010.0 and has the ISBN of 9.780981552156E12.

Flash Cards, by Yu Jian and translated by Ron Padgett, Wang Ping from Chinese, brings Chinese-language poetry from China into English through Yu Jian’s Chinese flash-card poetics, ordinary objects, and language broken into teachable, unsettling pieces. 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 cards, objects, speech, and the odd classroom where the world refuses simple vocabulary, 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. Flash Cards belongs in the translated poetry library because it adds contemporary Chinese experimental clarity, humor, and material attention.

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.