Wild geese sorrow by Chinese immigrants detained and translated by Jeffrey Thomas Leong

This is poetry from China.

Wild geese sorrow by Chinese immigrants detained translated by Jeffrey Thomas Leong is published by Calypso Editions. This is a Book originally written in Chinese. This was published in 2018.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781944593063E12.

Wild geese sorrow, translated by Jeffrey Thomas Leong from Chinese, reads as a collective historical work rather than a conventional single-author book, bringing Chinese-language poetry from China into English through Angel Island detention poems, collective Chinese immigrant testimony, and sorrow written under carceral pressure. The title already asks the reader to hear a group condition: not one polished lyric self, but many pressed voices surviving under constraint. I would read it for geese, detention, migration, and the scraped survival of poems made where freedom was withheld, not as an abstract lesson about migration. The best entry point is the human evidence of the poems themselves, the line that had to be made when ordinary speech was unavailable. Wild geese sorrow belongs in the translated poetry library because it preserves a collective historical Chinese immigrant poetics of confinement and witness.

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.