Wang Jiaxin

Darkening Mirror
Wang Jiaxin

translated by Diana Shi and George O’Connell

“Wang Jiaxin’s Darkening Mirror, edited and translated by Diana Shi and George O’Connell, belongs to this moment, and reading it, one is aware again that poetry is not a matter of movements and historical moments, but of individual voices, in this case stunningly alert and interior. Wang is the Chinese translator of Paul Célan, and reading him one feels something like the presence of the great voices of an intense inwardness in twentieth century European poetry.”
—Robert Hass, former U.S. Poet Laureate, Distinguished Professor in
Poetry and Poetics, University of California, Berkeley

“In Wang Jiaxin’s extraordinary poems, a tender, lyrical sensibility meets the bitter world. In these gorgeous translations, the poems shimmer with dreamlike images—gaps in the rooftiles filling with moans, slurred lights, the wind’s weight bending your bones and pushing you towards transformation or surrender. But beneath are intimate threats of knives glinting in darkness—deep images that emerge from the unconscious and name the shadow-self, and the world behind the world.”
—Dr. Tony Barnstone, The Albert Upton Professor of
English Language and Literature, Whittier College

“Thanks to these masterful translations by ’Connell and Shi, we can follow Wang Jiaxin’s journey through lyrical, intellectual shadowlands of meaning, memory, and existence. The collection is a milestone in English-language rendering of contemporary Chinese poetry.”
—John A. Crespi, Henry R. Luce Associate
Professor of Chinese, Colgate University


Darkening Mirror
ISBN: 9781939678225
$16.00
buy from Small Press Distribution