My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree by Yi Lei and translated by Tracy Smith

This is poetry from China.

My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree by Yi Lei translated by Tracy Smith is published by Graywolf Press. This is a Book originally written in Chinese. This was published in 2020.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781644450406E12.

My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree, by Yi Lei and translated by Tracy Smith from Chinese, brings Chinese-language poetry from China into English through Yi Lei’s expansive Chinese lyric, tree imagery, and a name imagined as something growing beyond the body. 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 tree, name, growth, and the widening self that poetry allows without fully explaining, 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. My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree belongs in the translated poetry library because it gives English-language readers a major contemporary Chinese woman poet in an intimate, large-scale register.

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.