Born in 1976 in Hengdian, Hubei Province, China, Yu Xiuhua is a poet from an impoverished rural background who was born with cerebral palsy. Yu began writing poetry in 1998. In 2014, her poem "Crossing Half of China to Fuck You" became an online sensation, launching her career as a celebrity poet and writer. Her poetry collection Moonlight Rests on My Left Palm (Guangxi Normal University Press, 2015) sold over 300,000 copies, a record for Chinese poetry titles of the past three decades. Yu received the Peasant Literature Award in 2016. Still Tomorrow, an award-winning documentary film about her life and poetry, was released to critical acclaim the same year. She was also the recipient of the Hubei Literary Prize in 2018.
"Yu finds the numinous in the very dust and air of
Hengdian....Sze-Lorrain's translation successfully evokes Yu's
transcendental connection to the world around her, from the grass
at her feet to the sky above her."
-Anne Henochowicz, Los Angeles Review of Books
"...a lyrical translation by Fiona Sze-Lorrain...The ruminative
essays, rendered in elegant but somewhat mannered prose, offer
context and insight on her life and poetry, [...] The poems, which
compress her thoughts into daring and disconcerting forms, are
another matter. [...] The multiplicity, therefore, becomes
essential, as the poems are rarely frozen in a single feeling. Yu
renders her life in a way that is irreducible."
- Chris Littlewood, The Washington Post
"Yu Xiuhua's writing is steeped in the imagination [...] Many of
the poems included in this work are moving precisely because of how
they register the limits of the imagination, rather than its
transformative capacities. [...] Rejecting the poetics of metaphor,
lines like [Yu's] call on us to look closely, listen carefully, and
notice the world around us."
-Rebecca Ruth Gould, Harriet Books, the Poetry
Foundation
"Yu Xiuhua's Moonlight Rests on My Left Palm, translated by Fiona
Sze-Lorrain, grows out of highly personal terrain. This farmer-poet
says in an essay (Moonlight is sectioned by eight lyrical essays):
'We have man-handled so many words that I only dream of using them
anew.' Yu says exactly what she means; and Sze-Lorrain honors the
feeling and music in intimate translation. Thus, the poet's
language rises out of the natural, tinged by elemental soil and
light."
-Yusef Komunyakaa, author of Everyday Mojo Songs of
Earth
"'Truth once spoken tends to be false,' writes Yu Xiuhua
in her incredible debut of essays and poems. I am smitten with Yu's
powerful writing, erotic poetry, and reflections on disability in
daily life. One poem reads, 'So risky, so heavy / O this love.' I
want nothing but risk in poetry and I feel proud to be a disabled
poet in Yu's company."
-The Cyborg Jillian Weise, author of Common Cyborg
"I love reading these poems and essays by Yu Xiuhua. I feel
befriended by them, by her. Courage, honesty, a love of words, and
a wry sense of humor run through the pages of Moonlight Rests on My
Left Palm, translated with grace and simplicity by Fiona
Sze-Lorrain. When Yu writes in an essay, 'There is no better ode to
life than a weed that grows ruthlessly and arches out of the
ground, despite its trauma,' we know she is telling us her own
story. And yet, in a poem called 'Wheat Has Ripened,' she says, 'I
am pleased to have landed here / like a sparrow skirting through
the sky-blue.' How can we be anything but grateful to a poet who
ends a poem of love lost: 'I still hope / to err over and
over'?"
-Mary Helen Stefaniak, author of The Cailiffs of Baghdad,
Georgia
"I couldn't stop underlining phrases, sentences, whole passages
that I wanted to quote, and think about! Yu Xiuhua's marvelous
collection, a hybrid of poetry and poetical essays, each reflecting
back on the other, is a transport into the soul, heart, and
sensibility of a unique and exquisite mind. Fiona Sze-Lorrain's
translation, generous with silence, space, and pitch-perfect
transparency, is a triumph in its own right. This is the sort of
book that you'll want to share immediately with your most
thoughtful friend."
-Minna Zallman Proctor, author of Landslide: True
Stories, editor of The Literary Review, and translator
of Natalia Ginzburg and Fleur Jaeggy
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