The Wild Great Wall by Zhu Zhu

Abstract

wheelie dumpster wind, / a channel not quite tuned-in-wind, / a hollow flightpath thunder wind, // a dog-eared wind, a knocked sign wind, / a spouseless phantom ocean-blown / autumnal graveyard Scots pine wind / who speaks in plurals, moves alone.” There’s much to recommend in this midcareer book, and much reason to eagerly anticipate future work from O’Callaghan. Fred Dings University of South Carolina Zhu Zhu The Wild Great Wall Trans. Dong Li. Los Angeles. Phoneme Media. 2018. 143 pages. It is not easy to select poems from twentyfive robust years of poetic output into one slim volume, especially for the acclaimed poet Zhu Zhu. The Wild Great Wall is a bilingual collection of thirty-eight poems, categorized into five sections and ordered chronologically from the 1990s to the present . According to the translator Dong Li, who nicknamed Zhu Zhu a “lone wolf,” his narrative histories are not “dressed as literary allusion / blending allure with parable” but are meant to be “a scalpel-like nib, to open / old China’s chest.” Zhu Zhu endeavors to excavate “the forbidden grounds of memory” by turning his various experiences into poignant yet restrained stanzas. “Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him” (Aldous Huxley), and Zhu Zhu has never lacked the gift of experience in conjunction with that of expression. In “The Loudspeaker,” he calmly recorded the death of Chairman Mao: “This news, like a mason’s trowel, / instantly scraped off every facial expression .” In “Small Town,” he compared his hometown to “a velvet-carpeted prison.” And even when he was traveling abroad, he still prayed for his country to “awaken from despotism, / the long night over, no more curfew,” as he had hoped in “Southof -Yangtze, a Republic.” Sometimes, his politically charged poems are full of sensual and erotic scenes, such as the little girl in “The Bayou of Time”: “her body was a key to open your manhood, / her back the most smooth silk that you had ever touched, / without her kiss you might have died of thirst,” and the model “thinks of her bottom that is not round enough” (“Blue Smoke”). In fact, what fascinates Zhu Zhu is not the alluring female body but the body politic—a sexual consciousness, which has been long suppressed, and a metaphor for depriving ordinary people of their liberty. It is just like what happens in “Geography Teacher”: “we really want to know— / along the opening of her V-neck sweater,” while “Even under her thick coat and the firm barrier of a scarf, / we still make out the flesh swaying beneath the folds of her clothing.” The teenager, or the poet, aspires to explore the “forbidden” memory of his motherland, like invaders climbing over the Great Wall. Yang Jing Nanjing Normal University Wilfred N’Sondé Concrete Flowers Trans. Karen Lindo Indiana University Press Congo-born French writer Wilfred N’Sondé continues his expansive influence on the French front of the Afropean writers’ movement by chronicling the crushing life of a young girl in Paris’s projects. Amid abuse and murder, Rosa Marie dreams of calm and freedom, showing the harsh truth that sometimes is the mother of the most uncompromising of hopeful and romantic spirits. Kristín Ómarsdóttir Waitress in Fall Trans. Vala Thorodds Carcanet Press In a wide-ranging anthology of poems selected from seven collections and thirty years of work (thus far), this collection gives anglophone readers a sizable introduction to esteemed Icelandic poet Kristín Ómarsdóttir. The poems tingle with the everyday, snippets of sex, cooking, warfare, and everything in between. The poet’s brevity belies the skill she demonstrates in creating her work, accruing broader meaning with each new piece. Nota Bene WORLDLIT.ORG 85 ...