The Ruins

A collection of beautifully resonant metaphysical poems from a singular voice in contemporary Chinese poetry.

Here's a witch poet walking backward into the future. There's an architect dispelling illusions and inviting us into communal living. The poems collected in The Ruins rise from a primordial wisdom that resists the quarrels of the marketplace, that keeps company under a leaky authoritarian roof and rubs off its burn, that carves out its own impossible freedom. In Dong Li's luminous translation of Ye's first full-length collection, each poem braids myth and mystery, inviting the reader into a liminal space where "echoes of the ancient, the imagined, and the 'now' sound off each other" on the page (The Cincinnati Review).