Presented here are nearly twenty of Taiwan’s most innovative poets: Xu Huizhi, Hong Hong, Chen Kehua, Luo Zhicheng, Yang Mu, Luo Fu, Luo Ying, Liu Kexiang, Ling Yu, Wu Sheng, Li Jinwen, Monaneng, Walis Nokan, Jian Zhengzhen, Chen Li, Hsia Yu, Shang Qin, and Du Shisan.

In an interview series titled “Frontier Perspectives,” the guest editors talk to Ya Xian, Yang Mu, and Luo Fu about the development of modern poetry in Taiwan. Writes Sze in the introduction to the interviews:

During the past five decades, Taiwan has evolved dramatically, from a little-known island to a nation-state with twenty-three million people and one of the largest economies in the world. Some of the best modern Chinese poetry comes from Taiwan, and the evolution of modern Taiwanese poetry tells the story of how the periphery has transformed itself into the frontier—an open, cosmopolitan zone where experimental leaps are possible and boundaries easily crossed to create a poetry “in the wild.”

The volume also includes the following:

• A remarkable portfolio of photographs by Sergio Goes documenting the Iona Contemporary Dance Theatre’s performance The Mythology of Angels. Introductory text and captions are by Gavan Daws.

• “Defying Time and History,” a provocative interview by Alberto Milián with Cuban American poet Ricardo Pau-Llosa.

• Ka-Shue (Letters Home), a full-length play by New Zealand poet-playwright Lynda Chanwai-Earle.

• New stories from Viet Nam, Japan, and the Philippines.

• Book reviews by Leza Lowitz, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, David Kipen, Laura Lent, Taylor Mignon, Lavonne Leong, and others.

—from “The Snow Is a Soft
and Gentle Forest” by Luo Ying
(translated by Andrea Lingenfelter)

He searched the area around them with his eyes. Nearby he spotted what seemed to be the floor of a destroyed house and, next to it, a lonely areca tree, its splintered top pointing to the heavens. Without a word, he lifted Ngan Hoa in his arms and rushed toward the tree. Hardly had she gotten her feet on the ground again when she felt him urgently pressing her body against the trunk of the tree. He extracted a flare parachute from his pack and wrapped it around her. As soon as it was draped around her body, she tore off her clothes and tossed them to the ground. In the blink of an eye, there was a naked Eve inside that thin and transparent covering and, as Lan stripped off his uniform and its camouflaging leaves, he became an Adam.

—from “The Legend” by Chu Van
(translated by Nam Son
and Wayne Karlin)

In Iona’s The Mythology of Angels, celestial beings are the spiritual manifestations of cultures all over the world. The Iona dancers are an ethnic mix, fleshly, intensely physical, moving always in awareness of the dancing body as part of the energy of the universe. Preparation for performance takes them through motionless meditation to boundless improvisation to endless repetitions that burn choreography into muscle memory.

—from Gavan Daws’s introduction
to Sergio Goes’s photographs of
Iona Contemporary Dance Theatre

The place the exile makes his own is possible by activating one of the highest functions of the imagination, the act of belonging, but in this case it is indistinguishable from reviving and possessing. One belongs to freedom, not to a place, but it needs place as a compass needs north. I’m not talking about a passive, feel-good, or fuzzy membership in a legacy, or the kind of strident ethno-babble that passes as multiculturalism these days. In this sense, the place of the exile is the memory theater that focuses all that is known about a condition and its history, and puts it at the service of wisdom, for lack of a less-mangled word. Exilic imagining is a defiance of history, as true creative imagining is a defiance of time. More precisely, exilic imagining at the service of creativity unites both defiances.

—Ricardo Pau-Llosa in
“Defying Time and History”

I am Eurasian by ethnicity, a fourth-generation New Zealander. Based on the Chinese side of my family (the Tung clan of Bak-Chuen), Ka-Shue uncovers some of the last 150 years of a buried history in New Zealand. There has been a noticeable absence of a Chinese voice in this country. Perhaps it is because the Chinese community has been producing its own work for its own people, but this work has been largely inaccessible to a wider public until now. The material has often been spoken in Chinese, and not produced for mainstream audiences.... Ka-Shue spans the cultures of New Zealand and China, encompassing a broad sweep of the political events between the two countries as a backdrop for the personal dramas of the characters.

—Lynda Chanwai-Earle in her
note to Ka-Shue (Letters Home

Photograph by Sergio Goes

Photograph by Sergio Goes

About the guest editors: Arthur Sze is the author of The Silk Dragon: Translations from the Chinese (Copper Canyon Press, 2001), which received the 2002 Western States Book Award, and The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998 (Copper Canyon Press, 1998).

Michelle Yeh is a professor in the department of East Asian languages and cultures at the University of California at Davis. Her most recent publications are Essays on Modern Chinese Poetry (1998); No Trace of the Gardener: Poems of Yang Mu (1998), cotranslated with Lawrence R. Smith; From the Margin: An Alternative Tradition of Modern Chinese Poetry (2000); and Frontier Taiwan: An Anthology of Modern Chinese Poetry (2001), coedited with N.G.D. Malmqvist.