Translations

Empty Chairs, Graywolf Press (under the name Jennifer Stern)

Empty Chairs presents the poetry of Liu Xia for the first time freely in both English translation and in the Chinese original. Selected from thirty years of her work, and including some of her haunting photography, this book creates a portrait of a life lived under duress, a voice in danger of being silenced, and a spirit that is shaken but so far indomitable. Liu Xia's poems are potent, acute moments of inquiry that peel back to expose the fraught complexity of an interior world. They are felt and insightful, colored through with political constraints even as they seep beyond those constraints and toward love. Translated by Ming Di and Jennifer Kronovet.

The Acrobat (Tebot Bach)

Poetry collection by Yiddish writer Celia Dropkin.

"These remarkably vivid poems could be titled something like 'Sensation And How To Think It.' They are carefully made, but the poet allows herself a certain carelessness to say the unsayable. She is interested in violence and tenderness together, as our nervous systems seem to be. There are lovely Reznikoffian glimpses of Manhattan; there are the pleasures of the short poem—the poem passing but lingering. The poems are of their time in the best possible way: you want to be there then, too. Early in the 20th century, in New York, having learned Yiddish or some other language new to you, watching a new age by born as if that were natural." —Alice Notley

Translated by Faith Jones, Jennifer Kronovet, and Samuel Solomon