Pee Poems

In the mythos of Chinese ethnogenesis, the sage king Yu countered the great flood by diverting it into rural irrigation. The contemporary Chinese poet Lao Yang adopts a more irreverent strategy for liquid transport, urination (with an emphasis on the nation). This apocalyptic book reads like the waste journals of a survivalist on the run from carnivorous leviathans, God, and the Chinese state. Calling to mind the work of Raúl Zurita and Kim Hyesoon, Yang’s Pee Poems consist of crystalline scatalogy, expressions of a profane piety. I can’t quite recall reading another poetry book that felt simultaneously this elemental and funny.

In these irreverent poems, we see a fearless spirit in confronting the darkness and absurdity around the poet. An extraordinary collection.

Burrowing trinkets of sound and fury, these poems shoot inward like velvet claws, evoking a courageous loneliness and despair that spits out flowers in return.

These poems eat themselves. There’s nothing for me to say. Nonetheless I send them to everyone I know. They’re all shaking their heads saying this is so good. These poems are so good I can’t point, I can only send them out. They are out there. Truly, yay.

These crisp, lean and clean words of Yang conjure up a landscape situated in uncertain times and with movable spiritual boundaries. Determined to resist the powerful tides of propaganda from political and commercial life, Yang’s poems here, like his struggle in the real world, intrigue, provoke, and challenge simultaneously.