Grass Roots by Xiang Yang and translated by John Balcom

This is poetry from China.

Grass Roots by Xiang Yang translated by John Balcom is published by Zephyr Press. This is a Book originally written in Chinese. This was published in 2014.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781938890079E12.

Grass Roots, by Xiang Yang and translated by John Balcom from Chinese, brings Chinese-language poetry from China into English through Xiang Yang’s Chinese/Taiwanese ground-level attention, grass roots, and the politics of ordinary life close to the soil. 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 grass, roots, people, and the stubborn low growth of local feeling, 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. Grass Roots belongs in the translated poetry library because it adds Chinese-language poetry with democratic texture, earthiness, and social 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.