Böcker av Xiao Yue Shan

In poems of memory, psychogeography, desire, and self-mythologization, then telling be the antidote is Xiao Yue Shan's assertion against the malignancy of forceful silences. By illuminating what has been left untold, these writings present the vivid landscape of a mind layering itself over the world, thinking and speaking its way through a myriad of places, objects, and visions. From rooms overlooking Tokyo rivers to Shanghai streets in the thrall of nighttime, Shan throws light on a nation's quieted crevices, on the distances between the carnal and the eternal, and most pivotally, on the ability of language to elucidate fact with imagination.

Color and light and life invigorate Xiao Yue Shan's de- but chapbook-or, in her own words: "a thrill of poppy and chrysanthemum". How Often I Have Chosen Love explores the rediscovery of her nuanced and complex family, her nuanced and complex sense of home, the nuanced and complex history of China. From the flag in Tiananmen Square to the apartments of San Francisco, Shan complicates our sense of home and history by filling every reflection and every moment with the bursting blue light of Hong Kong, the delicate sprawl of blooming vegetation-envisioning a creation myth that seeks to have "no tale of falling." In the voice of a modern woman of two nations, Shan's work finds her deepest authenticity. Her rich palette of color, of flower and nation and jewel, is an achievement only Shan's unique perspective could conceive. Xiao Yue Shan is an emerging poet whose words and heart beat with the exact rhythm of our times.