For Now I Am Sitting Here Growing Transparent

As an award-winning video artist and queer community organizer, Hong Kong poet Yau Ching brings crisp imagery and a socially-engaged outlook to her work.

Simultaneously erudite and earthy, her poetry is shaped by Hong Kong’s cultural position on the margins of mainland China and at the center of the Cantonese-speaking world. But her time spent in New York, London, Michigan, Taiwan, and elsewhere also informs her work, as do a breast cancer diagnosis in 2009, and 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 bilingual collection includes astute political poems, understated love poems, urban anti-eclogues, and prose poems.

Born in Hong Kong, award-winning poet, film/video artist, and scholar 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.

Chenxin Jiang is a PEN/Heim-winning translator from Italian, German, and Chinese. She was born in Singapore and grew up in Hong Kong. Recent 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). Her 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.