Drawn from her Taiwanese childhood, life in Taiwan as well as the anecdotes of Chinese and Hakka ancestors, Sarah Yihsuan Tso’s debut collection of poems written in English dwells on a vast array of topics such as bias, culture, suffering, luck, philosophy of life, Christianity, Buddhism, sexism, poetics, beauty, ethnic and gender groups, manhood, womanhood, environmentalism, geopolitics, migration, immigration, nature, and the inexorable fate of mortality. Written in an audacious, refined, and unique language par excellence, the book wrenches sapience from troves of dazing and memorable lines like: “The fate of concession is worn daily” in “a land ceded from the Dragon King, the Eastern Neptune.” “In this country, women and children are / conjoined twins.”
作者簡介:
Dr. Sarah Yihsuan Tso is Associate Professor at National Taiwan Normal University. She is the author of The Extension of Space in Globalization: The Globally Extended Space and Human Rights in Theories and Modern and Contemporary Taiwanese and American Poetry (2020), Global Time-Space Reorderings: Literary, Cultural, and Cinematic Transformations (2014), journal articles and book chapters on Taiwanese poetry, culture, and cinema, globalization, American multicultural poetry and novels, feminism, and John Keats, as well as poems.
目錄
CONTENTS
Global Meditations Under the Winter Roof 10 A Companion Poem to “Lord Leaf” 11 A Literary Language 12 Aubade for Sufferers 13 From to 14
Flowers of Life A White Mare 16 An Amethyst Gecko 17 Flowers Don’t Speak 19 An Excursion 20 The Little Bird 21
Buds of Time Does It Matter 24 Life Is Both 26 Why Do You 27
Psalms of God and Buddhas Cheng 30 Songs of Water 31 Diamonded Cross 32 Never Alone 33 Sign 34
Women’s Musings In this Country 36 Ms. Lin Can Drive 37 The Male Half: American Men 39 Not Darwinian 40 The Story of Mazang’s Metamorphosis 41 To Harassing Old Guys and Little Demons 42 Men in Taiwan 43 Women of a Kind 44 Women’s Musings 45
Arias for Taiwan and Ancestors Fantasies 48 Fragrance from Progenitors 49 Wontons of the Father’s Daughter 51 Hakka Sister 52 Or, Witch 53 Gem Flowers 55 From the Sea of the Dragon King 56
Notes 58
Under the Winter Roof
Under the winter roof, the curlicues, shells, and filaments of heat currents rose to the naked hands with white webs in the dry winter as all was icy and gray outside the translucid windows, wind blaring as pine needles swayed and shrubs trembled—
The heart was touched, as if by a bowl of brown-sugared red bean soup, or by the five-legged sinewed hands in Van Gogh’s self-portrait?