Karma (Tolsun Books, 2020)
Poems by Yin Lichuan; Translated from the Chinese by Fiona Sze-Lorrain
Karma (Tolsun Books, 2020) is Yin Lichuan’s volume of poems (bilingual edition) in Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s translation:
Spanning over a decade, these are poems of deep irreverence and relentless questioning. With an air of unrestrained freedom in both form and content, Yin Lichuan establishes an immediate intimacy with her reader. She prods at expectations and disdains concealment, as a youth looking at old age, in the earliest poems, and later as a mother. Throughout, she maintains her restless distrust of convention. In these English translations, poet and musician Sze-Lorrain presents an arresting chronological sequence of Yin’s fresh and fearless revelations. (Carolyn Kuebler, editor of New England Review)
American poet Jennifer Barber says: Yin Lichuan’s poems—in these potent translations by Fiona Sze-Lorrain—pierce the traditional lyric, injecting it with the antipoetic, the provocative, the unexpected, as when she asserts that “the most insane people master the art of gardening / enjoy making sweet-and-sour fish / they are chefs and housewives.” Her choice of detail startles and illuminates, a “pink plastic sandal buried in soil,” a county truck “loaded with black petroleum.” She is our guide, our accomplice, advising us to “go to the zoo in dry winter / to visit a weasel / and tiger / under thin ashen white sunlight” and we can’t do otherwise—such is the stark power of her gaze.
Please order it via Small Press Distribution, Amazon, or directly from Tolsun Books.
Poet, fiction writer, essayist, film director, and scriptwriter Yin Lichuan is one of the founders of the “Lower Body” Movement based in Beijing during the early 2000s. Born in 1973 in Chongqing, Sichuan province, she studied French at Beijing University before pursuing a graduate degree in filmmaking at École supérieure libre d’études cinématographiques (ESEC) in Paris. Her publications include several books of prose and fiction, as well as three volumes of poetry. Since 2006, Yin has devoted herself to filmmaking. She lives in Beijing.
Fiona Sze-Lorrain is a poet, translator, editor, and zheng harpist. Her recent book of poetry The Ruined Elegance (Princeton, 2016) was a finalist for the 2016 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her work includes two earlier collections, My Funeral Gondola (2013) and Water the Moon (2010), and several books of translation of contemporary Chinese, American, and French poets. Her latest translation is Ye Lijun’s My Mountain Country (World Poetry Books, 2019). Currently a Abigail R. Cohen Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination, she lives in Paris.