My Village by Wu Sheng and translated by John Balcom

This is poetry from China.

My Village by Wu Sheng translated by John Balcom is published by Zephyr Press. This is a Book originally written in Chinese. This was published in 2020.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781938890796E12.

My Village, by Wu Sheng and translated by John Balcom from Chinese, brings Chinese-language poetry from China into English through Wu Sheng’s village poetics, rural Chinese-language witness, and the dignity of local speech. 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 village, soil, labor, and the ordinary lives that become central when a poem refuses urban distraction, 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 Village belongs in the translated poetry library because it adds a grounded Chinese-language voice of place, work, and rural memory.

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.