Bed

Author: Wu Ang

Translator: Cecily Chen

Publisher: Beautiful Days Press (2025)

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