Pee Poems

Pee Poems by Yang Licai

Translated from Chinese by Joshua Edwards and Lynn Xu

Publication date: March 2022

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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

Excerpts

Two Lines Journal, March 8, 2022: An excerpt, in both English and Chinese at the Center for the Art of Translation.

Praise

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.

Ken Chen

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

Ha Jin

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.

Rob Mazurek

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.

Eileen Myles

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.

Zhang Er

Press

March 8, 2022: March 2022 | Action Books’ Micro-Reviews of Poetry in Translation in Action Books

A short review by Orchid Tierney

March 14, 2022: on Pee Poems by Lao Yang, translated by Joshua Edwards and Lynn Xu in On the Seawall

A review of the book by Nick Admussen

April 3, 2022: Pee Poems by Lao Yang in Stanza Break

A review of the book by Timothy Otte

April 5, 2022: Book Review: Pee Poems in Colorado Review

A review of the book by Tashiana Seebeck

May 22, 2022: Pee Poems in Hong Kong Review of Books

A review of the book by Brendan Riley

November 7, 2022: Pee Poems – Lao Yang in Full Stop

A review of the book by Angelo Mao

April 10, 2023: Monstrous Hybrids and the Conjuring of Legacy in The Yale Review

One of Lao Yang's poems features in this essay by Idra Novey

May 2, 2023: Kissing through a Curtain: Notes on Translation in Poetry

An essay by J. Mae Barizo mentions Lao Yang and this book.

July 23, 2023: Smithsonian literary fest flagged ‘sensitive’ topics before cancellation in The Washington Post

Broadsides for this book are blamed for the cancellation of the Smithsonian’s 2023 Asian American Literature Festival

October 2, 2023: Post Poet Pop Episode 20 in Post Poet Pop

Joshua Edwards and Lynn Xu are interviewed on Ken L.'s podcast about Lao Yang's work (1h43m)