Search results for ""Author Fiona Sze-Lorrain""

A startling and vivid debut novel in stories from acclaimed poet and translator Fiona Sze-Lorrain featuring deeply compelling Asian women who reckon with the past, violence, and exile—set in Shanghai, Beijing, Singapore, Paris, and New York.“Cooking for Madame Chiang,” 1946: Two cooks work for Madame Chiang Kai-shek and prepare a foreign dish craved by their mistress, which becomes a political weapon and leads to their tragic end. “Death at the Wukang Mansion,” 1966: Punished for her extramarital affair, a dancer is transferred to Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution and assigned to an ominous apartment in a building whose other residents often depart in coffins. “The White Piano,” 1996: A budding pianist from New York City settles down in Paris and is assaulted when a mysterious piano arrives from Singapore. “The Invisible Window,” 2016: After their exile following the Tiananmen Square massacre, three women gather in a French cathedral to renew their friendship and reunite in their grief and faith. Evocative, vivid, disturbing, and written with a masterly ear for language, Dear Chrysanthemums renders a devastating portrait of diasporic life and inhumanity, as well as a tender web of shared memory, artistic expression, and love.

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In her new collection, Fiona Sze-Lorrain offers a nuanced yet dynamic vision of humanity marked by perils, surprises, and the transcendence of a "ruined elegance." Through an intercultural journey that traces lives, encounters, exiles, and memories from France, America, and Asia, the poet explores a rich array of historical and literary allusions to European masters, Asian sources, and American influences. With candor and humor, each lyrical foray is sensitive to silence and experience: "I want to honor / the invisible. I'll use the fog to see white peaches." There are haunting narratives from a World War II concentration camp, the Stalinist Terror, and a persecuted Tibet during the Cultural Revolution. There are also poems that take as their point of departure writings, paintings, sketches, photographs, and music by Gu Cheng, Giorgio Caproni, Bonnard, Hiroshige, Gao Xingjian, Kertesz, and Debussy, among others. Grounded in the sensual, these poems probe existential questionings through inspirations from nature and the impermanent earth. Described by the Los Angeles Review of Books as "a high lyricist who refuses to resort to mere lyricism in order to articulate her experience," Sze-Lorrain renews her faith in music and poetic language by addressing the opposing aesthetics of "ruins" and "elegance," and how the experience of both defies judgment.

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In her new collection, Fiona Sze-Lorrain offers a nuanced yet dynamic vision of humanity marked by perils, surprises, and the transcendence of a "ruined elegance." Through an intercultural journey that traces lives, encounters, exiles, and memories from France, America, and Asia, the poet explores a rich array of historical and literary allusions to European masters, Asian sources, and American influences. With candor and humor, each lyrical foray is sensitive to silence and experience: "I want to honor / the invisible. I'll use the fog to see white peaches." There are haunting narratives from a World War II concentration camp, the Stalinist Terror, and a persecuted Tibet during the Cultural Revolution. There are also poems that take as their point of departure writings, paintings, sketches, photographs, and music by Gu Cheng, Giorgio Caproni, Bonnard, Hiroshige, Gao Xingjian, Kertesz, and Debussy, among others. Grounded in the sensual, these poems probe existential questionings through inspirations from nature and the impermanent earth. Described by the Los Angeles Review of Books as "a high lyricist who refuses to resort to mere lyricism in order to articulate her experience," Sze-Lorrain renews her faith in music and poetic language by addressing the opposing aesthetics of "ruins" and "elegance," and how the experience of both defies judgment.

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The highly anticipated new collection from a poet whose previous book was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book PrizeRain in Plural is the much-anticipated fourth collection of poetry by Fiona Sze-Lorrain, who has been praised by The Rumpus as "a master of musicality and enlightening allusions." In the wholly original world of these new poems, Sze-Lorrain addresses both private narratives and the overexposed discourse of the polis, using silence and montage, lyric and antilyric, to envision what she calls "creating between liberties." With a moral precision embracing us without eschewing I, she rethinks questions of citizenship, the selections of sensory memory, and, by extension, the tether of word and image to the actual. She writes, "I accept the truth in newspapers / by holding the murder of my friends against my chest. // To each weather forecast I give thanks: / merci for every outdated // dusk/dawn." Agrippina the Younger, Franz Kafka, Bob Dylan, a butoh performance, an unnamed Raku tea bowl—each has a place here. Made whole by time and its alteration in timelessness, synchrony, coincidences, and accidents, Rain in Plural beautifully reveals an elegiac yet ever-evolving inner life.

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"Subtle and compelling, Bai Hua is among the best in contemporary Chinese poetry."—David Der-wei Wang, Harvard University "Fish" Unfathomable, the fish can't sing swimming from silence to silence It needs things, it needs to speak but it stares blindly at a stone The strength of endurance is too precise Senility urges it to walk the road of kindness What is it? Image of a people or an act of soundless immersion? The face of grievance veers toward shadow the silence of death toward error Born as metaphor to clarify a fact: the throat where ambiguous pain begins Considered the central literary figure of the post-Obscure (post-"Misty") poetry movement during the 1980s, Bai Hua was born in Chongqing, China, in 1956. After graduating from Guangzhou Foreign Language Institute, he taught at various universities before working as an independent writer. His first collection of poems, Expression (1988), found immediate critical acclaim. A highly demanding writer, Bai Hua has a small but selective poetic output: between the mid-'80s and 2007 Bai Hua wrote fewer than one hundred poems, most of which continue to command a large audience across China. After a silence of more than a decade, he began writing again in 2007. This bilingual selection is a comprehensive overview of Bai Hua's writing career. Fiona Sze-Lorrain writes and translates in French, English, and Chinese. Her recent work includes Water the Moon (Marick Press, 2010). Co-director of Vif Éditions and one of the editors at Cerise Press, she is also a zheng concertist.

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Starting with the viral poem "Crossing Half of China to Fuck You," Yu Xiuhua's raw collection chronicles her life as a disabled, divorced, single mother in rural China. Yu Xiuhua was born with cerebral palsy in Hengdian Village in the Hunan Province, in Southern China. Unable to attend college, travel, or work the land with her parents, Yu remained home where she could help with housework. Eventually she was forced into an arranged marriage that became abusive. She divorced her husband and moved back in with her parents, taking her son with her. In defiance of the stigma attached to her disability, her status as a divorced single mother, and as a peasant in rural China, Yu found her voice in poetry. Starting in the late 90's, her writing became a vehicle with which to explore and share her reflections on homesickness, family and ancestry, the reality of disability in the context of a body's urges and desires. Then, Yu's poem "Crossing Half of China to Fuck You" blew open the doors on the patriarchal and traditionalist world of contemporary Chinese poetry. She became an internet sensation, finding a devoted following among young readers who enthusiastically welcomed her fresh, bold, confessional voice into the literary canon. Thematically organized, Yu's essays and poems are in conversation with each other around subjects that include love, nostalgia, mortality, the natural world and writing itself.

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Considered a representative figure of the post-1970s Chinese poets, Yu Xiang is part of a new generation of contemporary Chinese poets following in the footsteps of the "Obscure" (otherwise known as "Misty") poets and the post-"Obscure" writers. If identification is indeed a shadow act of figuration, Yu Xiang does not care for any post-age or post-modern label. Her response toward specific social or political realities in China during these recent years differ from her predecessors' during their respective epochs, in the sense that she does not necessarily depict them from an oblique stance. She does not merely dwell in ambiguities, contradictions and ambivalence. Nor does she present her work as a purely journalistic understanding of the downtrodden: impoverished villagers, traumatized mothers who lost children during the collapse of "tofu-skin" schools during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Instead, she depicts characters with a comparative eye—not just as a witness—but also from the starting point of having "felt a feeling," an epiphany. Unafraid of going near politically radioactive realities and histories, Yu Xiang is least interested in scoring ideological points, or telling "her" side of a narrative, be it as an artist or a social critic. At first read, each of Yu Xiang's poems comes across as an intimate address with a personal touch. Through poetry, she seeks a specific reader and listener, while being a reader and listener herself. She is interested in peeling silence with verses. Fiona Sze-Lorrain writes and translates in French, English, and Chinese. Her recent translation work includes Wind Says (Zephyr Press)—collected poems of Bai Hua. "Yu Xiang’s poems are the poetic equivalent of shoegazer rock. She takes the mundane—a whiff of cigarette smoke, a falling leaf, a housefly—and stares at it so intently that it splits open to reveal something unexpected." — Naomi Long Eagleson, wordswithoutborders.org

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Her work has been translated into English, French, Russian, Spanish, German, Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Belgian, and Romanian. Awarded the prestigious Liu Li’an Poetry Prize in 1996 In 2009, she also garnered four of the nation’s most important literary awards: the Poetry & People Award (considered the most influential Chinese popular international award), the Yulong Poetry Prize, the “Best Ten Poets in China” Award, and the Bing Xin Children’s Literature New Work Award. Featured writer at the upcoming International Poetry Nights [http://www.ipnhk.com/] in Hong Kong (November 2013) One of the likely participants (with translator Sze-Lorrain) for a new round of Luce Foundation Fellowships at the Vermont Studio Center [http://www.vermontstudiocenter.org/news/]

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Influenced by both the "gray, sinister sea" near the village where Yi Lu grew up during the Cultural Revolution, and the beauty of the sea in the books she read as a child, Sea Summit is a collection of paradox and questioning. The sea is an impossible force to the poet: it is both a majestic force that predates man, and something to carry with us wherever we go, to be put "by an ancient rattan chair," so we can watch "its waves toss" from above. Exploring the current ecological crisis and our complicated relationship to the wildness around us, Yi Lu finds something more complex than a traditional nature poet might in the mysterious connection between herself and the forces of nature represented by the boundless ocean. Translated brilliantly by the acclaimed poet Fiona Sze-Lorrain, this collection of poems introduces an important contemporary Chinese poet to English-language readers.

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