Bed by Wu Ang (trans. Cecily Chen) [PREORDER]

Poetry/Translation, 118pg.

Written in Beijing around the turn of the millennium, Bed by Wu Ang is a collection that glides between dreamlike personas, charged observation, and casual despair. In Wu Ang’s wry, charismatic gaze, bored lovers turn into furniture, hospitals harbor shorts-stealing crocodiles, and the poet herself becomes a “female cockroach.” Mordant, unapologetic, and “extravagant,” Wu Ang’s necessary voice is collected here in a bilingual edition for the first time, translated by Cecily Chen.

"You don’t so much read these restive, rebellious poems as succumb to the delirious splendor of their doom and seduction. Lovers equivocate, cities melt into midnight visions, and memories turn prophetic as Wu Ang unleashes a cool fury of language that’s at once sardonic, anti-romantic, worldly wise, and self-knowing, delivered through the persona of a woman whose pronounced intelligence and independence has sharpened to defiance. Cecily Chen’s nimble translations deftly capture the unvarnished idiom and fearlessness of this singular poet."
–Pamela Lu

"Held now by Wu Ang’s Bed, we enter the dreamscape otherworld of poetic translation: the alternate linguistic reality of poetry that translation inevitably produces but too often shrouds under the pretense of equivalence. Instead, Bed begins, “Please could you bury me in a mirror / So I know who lingers before my grave.” Cecily Chen reveals how every translation is essentially a ghost story, and in the English surreality she creates from Wu Ang’s Chinese poems, the uncanny specters of translingual, transcultural disfigurement and defamiliarization that roam these pages – such as “Marilynne Monro,” “Donte of Firenzia,” a philosopher called “Cant,” and the poet “Wu Ang” herself, referred to in third person and romanized – ultimately offer a form of rewriting global Capitalism’s preordained scripts of work, rent and romance. In Bed, Wu Ang tries and tosses out these scripts and, through Chen, finds a form of herself in an English that’s sharp, sly and strange enough that she can write, in indelible, jet-black ink on the sheets, “I was here – ”"
–Mia You

"A gift to us, an important new translation, is this collection of poems by Wu Ang selected and translated by Cecily Chen. Dizzyingly surreal, visceral, and diaristic, Wu Ang writes the vivid indignities and pleasures of everyday life with affecting attention. The inner life is a grim and sensual fairytale, rough and erotic terrain, a place only poetry can navigate with its unflinching logics. “Actually, someone has already pronounced / The meaning of life / It is / A full stomach and lust,” these poems convince and compel."
–Wendy Xu

Read an excerpt at The Poetry Project.

ISBN: 979-8-9916468-6-4

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Cecily Chen is a writer and translator from Beijing, China. She is currently completing her PhD in English literature at the University of Chicago, where she works in experimental Asian American poetics. Her translations and criticism have appeared in The Poetry Project Newsletter, SARKA, the tiny, Chicago Review, and Textual Practice. She is also the poetry editor at Chicago Review.

Wu Ang (b. 1974) is a Chinese poet, writer, and journalist. She is perhaps best known for her association with the “Lower Body Poets,” a group of experimental poets active in Beijing in the late 90s/early 2000s, which believed in the intimate connection between poetic language and carnality and desire.