An Ordinary Day - Softcover

Xue Di

Softcover

ISBN 10: 188229534X ISBN 13: 9781882295340

Publisher: Alice James Books, 2002

Synopsis

Permeated with the loneliness of exile, these sensual lyric poems straddle the gap between Chinese and American sensibilities, politics, and culture. The poems contain both autobiography and a kind of universal biography—they weep, and sing, for us all.

About this title

About the Author

Born in Beijing, Xue Di has since shortly after the Tienanmen Square Massacre, been a Visiting Fellow in Brown University's Freedom to Write Program. His poetry books include three translations in English: Circumstances, Heart Into Soil, and Flames; and three in Chinese: Hui Yi (Remembering), Chan Li (Trembling), and Meng Yi (Dream Talk). Also in Chinese, he published a criticism of modern Chinese poetry, and has edited several Chinese poetry anthologies. He is the two-time recipient of the Hellman/Hammett Award.

From the Inside Flap

"'Crack the world to its core, you'll find a poem.' The ordinary world Xue Di refracts is a landscape across which we are forced from end to another, moved by an exquisite and soulful acknowledgement of human evil and the urgency of living counter to evil. The extraordinary poems he fashions startle, and they insist themselves into us through masterful imagery and a voice we trust and come to revere. 'Will my perplexities be resolved?' he asks in one poem, and it becomes clear that any answer comes from journeys like his that take us as far into human possibility as they do." -Forrest Hamer

"The poems in An Ordinary Day demanded to be written. They depict a lonely, beautiful terrain between (and including) China and the United States, and convey a sense of exile that is powerful and urgent. Throughout the collection, Xue Di's voice is consistent, singular, and clear." -Adrienne Su

"Xue Di writes about personal loneliness and the loneliness of what he elsewhere calls 'this pestilential century' in poems that proceed, often without transition, through startling sequences of juxtaposed images. An Ordinary Day is both carnal-the body is always involved in his thinking and feeling--and audacious in its insistence on sentiment as the marker of memories, the essential medium for human relationships. These poems are, themselves, 'Fields of flowers opened by light.'" --Forrest Gander

Xue Di's poems are like snowflakes that dissolve, yet burn, on the tongue. Poems of solitude, poems of exile, poems of longing--you hear the cry of things irrevocably twisted. --Arthur Sze

Edition details

• Publisher: Alice James Books
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 188229534X
• ISBN 13: 9781882295340
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 64