A Summer Day in the Company of Ghosts: Selected Poems
Translated by Andrea Lingenfelter
About
Shanghai winters, a summer day with ghosts, petals in darkness, an empty lane lit by moonlight — Wang Yin's poems move between the physical and the spectral with the precision of a photographer composing in language. This bilingual collection traces his full career: from the surrealist, Deep Image–influenced work of the 1980s through the rawer immediacy of the 1990s to the existential weavings of recent decades. Wang Yin describes his poems as "flecks of salt clinging ambivalently to a horse's back" — and the image captures their quality exactly: small, sharp, attached to something larger and always in motion. His sensibility is both cosmopolitan and lyrical, his beauty inseparable from psychological pain. The first comprehensive English translation of one of China's most important living poets — and a landmark for anyone interested in where Chinese poetry is now.
