In the Roar of the Machine

Poems about life in the Chinese factories by a brilliant and passionate poet and workers’ rights activist.

This collection shines light on the human toll behind the production of cheap goods, all set in the context of classical Chinese literature, the natural environment of southern China, and the voices of the poet’s own ancestors.

Zheng Xiaoqiong is one of the most significant living Chinese poets whose unique poetics brings to the fore the plight of factory workers, women, and the rural poor in contemporary China, while situating these sociological concerns within a larger context that includes classical Chinese poetry, the voices of Zheng’s ancestors, the natural environment of southern China, and her native Huangma Mountains in central Sichuan.

Zheng spent nearly a decade working in the factories and warehouses of Guangdong province, one of the largest manufacturing centers in the world. Her poems give voice to the global economy’s human toll: the twelve-hour days on the assembly line, the endless mechanical din, the injuries and drudgery, the homesick murmur of far-flung dialects in the dorms.

Zheng is an advocate for worker’s and women’s rights, but what counters the roar of the machines in her poetry is the tenderness of her attention: ＂we / live, the nearby crowds that come and go / they live in my poetry, on paper, immense / yet frail, the tiny voices of these sentences / these fragile hearts.＂

Zheng Xiaoqiong is a Chinese poet from Nanchong, Sichuan. She worked in a local hospital before relocating to the industrial city of Dongguan, where she worked in factory assembly lines and wrote poems centered on industrial labor and the experiences of migrant workers. In 2007, she won the Liqun Literature Award from the People’s Literature Publishing House. She lives in Guangzhou.

Eleanor Goodman is an American poet and author of the poetry collection Nine Dragon Island. An acclaimed translator from the Chinese, her translation Something Crosses My Mind: Selected Poems of Wang Xiaoni was a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Award and won the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize. She is a research associate at the Harvard Fairbank Center.