This book will be published in February 2025.

Yau Ching is an award-winning film/video artist, scholar, writer and poet. Her poetry — simultaneously erudite and earthy — is shaped by Hong Kong’s cultural position on the margins of mainland China and at the centre of the Cantonese-speaking world. Time spent in New York, London, Michigan, Taiwan, and elsewhere also informs her work, as did a breast cancer diagnosis in 2009, as well as her long-time work advocating for sexual minorities.

Yau’s oeuvre explores gender, aesthetics, colonialism, relationships, and illness with a wide range of emotions and registers, and frequently employs wordplay. This debut bilingual collection includes astute political poems, understated love poems, urban anti-eclogues, and prose poems. The book also includes eight still images from her films/videos.

Born in Hong Kong, Yau Ching spent years teaching both in Hong Kong and Taipei, while also founding and programming several film and theatre festivals dedicated to telling the stories of sex workers and the queer community. She has authored more than thirteen books, and produced and directed more than ten films and videos. Her poems have been featured in such publications as World Literature Today, Asymptote, Catamaran, Transpacific Literary Project, and at the Center for the Art of Translation. More information is available at www.yauching.com.

Chenxin Jiang is a PEN/Heim-winning translator from Italian, German, and Chinese. She was born in Singapore and grew up in Hong Kong. Her translations include Tears of Salt: A Doctor’s Story by Pietro Bartolo and Lidia Tilotta (W. W. Norton), shortlisted for the 2019 Italian Prose in Translation Award, Volatile Texts: Us Two by Zsuzsanna Gahse (Dalkey Archive), and the PEN/Heim-winning The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution by Ji Xianlin (NYRB). Chenxin Jiang’s translation of Yau Ching’s poem “Trial Run” was a winner of the 2020 Words Without Borders–Academy of Americans Poets Poems in Translation Contest. She currently serves on the board for the American Literary Translators Association.

For now I am sitting here growing transparent

$17.00

Quantity

For now I am sitting here growing transparent

Translated from Chinese by Chenxin Jiang

136 pages | Bilingual on facing pages

$17

ISBN 978-1-938890-34-5
"From recalling the various maladies caused by growing up in a public housing estate to chatting with a steak about ethics, Yau Ching’s poetry is at once powerful and vulnerable, serious and whimsical, bold and understated, erudite and colloquial.

... Reading these poems is like conversing with a brilliant and thoughtful friend about issues big and small concerning Hong Kong and the world at large, one who is unafraid to ask the heartbreaking questions. Chenxin Jiang’s vivid translation recreates Yau’s playfulness and careful attentiveness to language, resulting in a bilingual volume of poetry that is rebellious, timely, and ultimately unforgettable.

—Jennifer Feeley, translator of Not Written Words, by Xi Xi

I read this entire volume in one sitting. It is fascinating the way only poetry that hits home hardest can be, and I read it the only way I could, as if chased by monsters. Yau Ching’s poems exploit the genre’s potential to be uncompromising and marry this quality with an embedded historicity. They render love, death, and adventure in neoliberal colonial modernity as what should be unthinkable now (because it is contradictory or simply should not be) in a terse and vivid language: your and my past/has become an unprecedented/ present. This may be true as well for any reading of this volume.

—Amie Parry, Professor of Literature, National Central

University, Taiwan
Moon

Because you can’t read Chinese characters

there’s no way I can tell you that

in this way of telling time

the moon is always full on the fifteenth

The first of the month is a crescent

a new start but

yes where I’m from

we don’t talk about this either

Your head cupped in your hands you toss your hair:

why does our way of telling time

always forget the moonlight?

I’ve no way to complete the circles of life

when planting

onions and peppers and perillas

In this moment your hair is splattered like a Pollock autumn

sliding

into a time that’s neither yours nor mine

someone is busy talking about stars expanding, which is to say contracting

while we spin like spaghetti in a black hole

what have you got against February

you and the quilt spinning

stubborn lips: don’t think I’m not

straining to keep my eyelids open

Mona,

I almost forgot to say

our month

also means moon

For now I am sitting here growing transparent

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