Pee Poems
Pee Poems by Yang Licai
Translated from Chinese by Joshua Edwards and Lynn Xu
Second edition. Publication date: June 2024
If the world is in a blossom, then it’s in spit and shit too.
You love to pick flowers, I silently suppress a turd.
Chinese writer Yang Licai’s Pee Poems go deep and dark—with deceptive lightness—into the metaphysical and the social, offering insight and humor along the way. Written over the past decade, this iconoclastic collection is the first of Yang’s to be translated from Mandarin into English.
Pee Poems is comprised of meditations, fragments, lyrics, and aphorisms, in dialogue with Chan hermit poets and Zen tricksters, with radical grassroots activism, experimental music, and Dada. Yang regards the body’s most basic functions and desires as philosophical problems, restoring garbage and bladder-control to the field of politics, inhabiting both epochal and local time. In Pee Poems vocabulary fights itself, while impossible opposites are lovingly conjoined.
Joshua Edwards and Lynn Xu, poets both and friends of the author, translate Yang with brave tenderness, revealing a thinker whose observations are as simple and as rich as the languages we speak and the shit we shit.
In this day and age
What needs to be spoken
Is the straight truth