Wang Yin’s Ghosts City Sea, translated by Andrea Lingenfelter
Poetry. Bilingual Chinese and English. June 2021. Featuring photography by Wang Yin. Edited by David Perry. Make inquiries here. Available for order from Small Press Distribution, Amazon, and elsewhere. Published by arrangement with Yilin Press.
Read poems from Ghosts City Sea:
Read Nick Admussen’s review of Wang Yin’s Ghosts City Sea in On the Seawall
Read “At Last There Is Yesterday,” selected by Victoria Chang for publication in The New York Times Magazine
Read Simon Schuchat’s review in The Poetry Project Newsletter
Read Anne Henochowicz’s review in The Los Angeles Review of Books
John Yau, Victoria Chang and Forrest Gander on Wang Yin’s Ghosts City Sea
When Wang Yin looks at “three pines [growing] on a northern shore, he sees that they are “like hair under a barber’s constant scissors.” He spends “a summer day in the company of ghosts.” In “The Scent of Autumn,” he writes:
rain falls on my lips, spreads like disinfectant
across a newly poured asphalt roadSimultaneously intimate and visionary, and always brimming with feelings that cannot quite be named, these poems go beyond description. They are songs of praise haunted by feelings of isolation, disruption, and invisibility:
autumn’s withered hair falls
quietly into the recesses of a drawerReading Wang Yin’s poems, I found myself transported to a world animated by paradoxes — a place at once austere and lush, utterly strange and oddly familiar.
His photographs heightened these visceral perceptions, as I was convinced I could smell the rain falling hard around me, while I was standing lost on a dark, glistening street in an unknown city.
— John Yau
In Wang Yin’s gorgeous poems, everything traverses, even “today’s heavy rain poured down last night.” This same rain “falls into tomorrow.” Weather, like time, space, history, and even the self, is never held in one place, is mutable. In poems with an occasional comma, no periods, and all lowercase in Andrea Lingenfelter’s translation, we see how form mirrors that fluid continuum. In these poems, everything is a ghost but there’s no origin of the apparitions. Even “tears are a chariot without a driver” and stillness “has lost its stillness.” Ultimately, Wang Yin’s stunning poems are paratactic breathless images, piling on one after another, recognizing our lack of agency during our brief tour on this earth, but not without hope as “we slowly reawaken.”
— Victoria Chang
“I put myself inside the urn that held you,” Wang Yin writes, putting himself inside the book that you hold. Emotions in his poems are always connected to a vivid, starkly sensual world: “a rooftop shining with rain is the only letter that arrives.” It is the poignant clarity of his images, so memorably rendered by Andrea Lingenfelter, that makes his poems burn in your brain long after you close the book.
— Forrest Gander