A Summer Day in the Company of Ghost Launch Party
2022/10/16
3-6 PM
We at Accent Sisters are thrilled to celebrate Wang Yin--for his book A Summer Day in the Company of Ghosts- with its translator Andea Lingenfelter, Poet Yuxi Lin and Accent Sisters director Jiaoyang Li.
A Summer Day in the Ghost
A new, bilingual collection of poetry by a pioneering, multi-talented Chinese writer and photographer in a landmark English translation.
“My poems are flecks of salt clinging ambivalently to a horse’s back,” Wang Yin writes. This is the first comprehensive collection of this important Chinese poet’s work to appear in English, translated by Andrea Lingenfelter. Readers can follow the full arc of his career, from the early, surrealist, and Deep Image–influenced work of the 1980s, when he made his debut as a post-Misty poet, through the turn toward the rawer, more immediate poetry of the nineties, and on to the existential and ineffable weavings of his more recent work. Wang’s sensibility is both cosmopolitan and lyrical, and his poetry has a subtlety and beauty that contrasts with the often physically painful imagery with which he depicts psychological reality, a reality expressed as various states of mind struggling against the suppression of memory. Shanghai winters, a winter in Katowice, a summer day with ghosts, blue shadows, petals in the darkness, an “empty lane lit up by moonlight”—the poems of this extraordinary volume illuminate the inner life as a singular encounter between physical and spiritual realms.
Bio
Wang Yin, born in Shanghai in 1962, started publishing poetry in the 1980s, becoming recognized as one of the foremost writers of the Third Generation, or post-Misty, poets. As an art critic and reporter for Southern Weekly,he has traveled extensively in Europe and Asia. His photography, often documenting his engagement with contemporary artists and writers, has been exhibited both in China and internationally. He has curated the international “Poetry Comes to the Museum” reading series at the Minsheng Museum in Shanghai since 2012, the longest running poetry series in the country. Wang Yin’s 2015 collection, Limelight, won two of China’s top poetry prizes, and his poetry has been translated into French, Spanish, Japanese, Polish among other languages. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals and magazines including New York Times Magazine, Granta,Tupelo Quarterly, Paper Republic and Washington Square Review.
Andrea Lingenfelter is an award-winning translator, poet, and scholar of Sinophone literature. Her numerous translations include The Changing Room: Selected Poetry of Zhai Yongming (Northern California Book Award winner), Hon Lai Chu’s The Kite Family (NEA Translation Fellowship grantee), Li Pik-wah’s (Lilian Lee) Farewell My Concubineand The Last Princess of Manchuria, and Mian Mian’s Candyand Vanishing Act. She teaches both literary translation and the literature and film of the Asia-Pacific at the University of San Francisco.
Yuxi Lin is a Chinese American writer, AAWW Margins Fellow, and winner of the Breakout 8 Writers Prize. Her writing has appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, Epiphany, The Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from New York University, where she was a Lillian Vernon Fellow.
Jiaoyang Li is a poet, wedding minister and multimedia artist based in New York City and New Jersey, she co-founded Accent Sisters and Accent Society.
