The Ruins: Poems

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).

Ye Hui is an acclaimed Chinese metaphysical poet who lives in Nanjing. His poems in Dong Li's English translation have appeared or are forthcoming in 128 Lit, The Arkansas International, Asymptote, Bennington Review, Blackbird, Cincinnati Review, Circumference, Copihue Poetry, Guernica, Kenyon Review, Lana Turner, Nashville Review, POETRY, Poetry Northwest, and Zocálo Public Square.
Dong Li is a multilingual author who translates from Chinese, English, French, and German. He is the English translator of the PEN/Heim winning The Gleaner Song by Song Lin, and The Wild Great Wall by Zhu Zhu. His PEN/Heim winning The Ruins by the Chinese poet Ye Hui is forthcoming from Deep Vellum. His debut collection of poetry, The Orange Tree, was the inaugural winner of the Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize and a finalist for the Poetry of Society of America's T.S. Eliot Four Quartets Prize.