It’s Not Every Day You Get to See Your Poems in Mandarin - April 22, 2015

A couple of months ago I received the seventh issue of Enclave (Winter 2014), a handsomely designed Chinese literary journal supported by the Shenzhen Cultural Production Fund. Included were a number of my poems, translated into Mandarin by Qin Sunshu, and featured in a larger “Horizons” portfolio alongside work by Peter Campion, Wang Ao, and Wang Xiaoni. I’m honored to know my poetry has crossed the Pacific and remain fascinated by the sight of it in Mandarin, which I very much cannot read. I hope soon to find someone who can read them back to me in Chinese.

Many of the Enclave poems are from Other Romes–“Flying is Everything I Imagine Now and More,” “Coccyx,” and “To My Older Sibling, Miscarried”–while others will appear in my unpublished follow-up, The Identity Thief. My thanks to the wonderful Eleanor Goodman for this opportunity; her own translators from Mandarin appear in Enclave 7, as well as Mantis 13, out now! (And check out her full-length translation of Wang Xiaoni’s Something Crosses My Mind, released by Zephyr Press last year.)