Prison Poems & Temple Speak
Prison Poems & Temple Speak by Yang Licai
Translated from Chinese by Joshua Edwards and Lynn Xu
First edition. Publication date: February 2027
Incarceration was the turning point
Cause and effect were revealed by pain
This book, the second by the author of Pee Poems, brings together two distinct new collections: Prison Poems gathers work related to the poet’s time as a political prisoner in China, while Temple Speak draws from his ensuing life as a Buddhist monastic. The movement between these intense experiences makes a path to profound concerns: What is the nature of suffering? “Who is ‘I’?” How can cycles be broken? These poems imagine the possibilities of our world with playfulness, urgency, and sincerity.
Praise
Joshua Edwards and Lynn Xu’s breath-like translations of Prison Poems & Temple Speak are pilgrimages, ephemeral yet enduring, from the clarity of the heart to the faraway thought.
Brandon Shimoda
When the iron treads of tyranny grind across our bodies,
Yang Licai tends a flame of compassion, gentle and unwavering,
Moving through words toward the silence of Zen.
Jinyan Zeng
Poetry’s enlightening spirit consists in its capacity to move mountains around the heart—to hear the cries from the prison and the temple as proceeding from the same space, into which they vanish, when the poet listens. Though this is the implicit reality of any poem, Yang’s book makes the path of understanding this reality explicit and illuminates it as only poetry can—not in passively absorbing the ancients’ wisdom but by embodying its mind.
Farnoosh Fathi