Pee Poems (second edition)

Author: Yang Licai

Translators: Joshua Edwards and Lynn Xu

Publisher: Circumference Books (2024)

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. This collection, written over the past decade, is the first of Yang’s to be translated from Chinese into English. 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.

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.