Mercury Rising: Contemporary Poetry from Taiwan

Series Editor Frank Stewart.
Guest Editors Arthur Sze and Michelle Yeh.

Mercury Rising features new poetry from Taiwan, assembled by guest editors Arthur Sze and Michelle Yeh. Daring and original, the poetry of Taiwan is culturally distinct, blending indigenous, Taiwanese, immigrant, and classical Chinese writing with influences from postmodern Europe, Japan, and America.

Presented here are nearly twenty of Taiwan’s most innovative poets: Xu Huizhi, Hong Hong, Chen Kehua, Luo Zhicheng, Yang Mu, Luo Fu, Luo Ying, Liu Kexiang, Ling Yu, Wu Sheng, Li Jinwen, Monaneng, Walis Nokan, Jian Zhengzhen, Chen Li, Hsia Yu, Shang Qin, and Du Shisan.

In an interview series titled “Frontier Perspectives,” the guest editors talk to Ya Xian, Yang Mu, and Luo Fu about the development of modern poetry in Taiwan.

The volume also includes the following:

• A remarkable portfolio of photographs by Sergio Goes documenting the Iona Contemporary Dance Theatre’s performance The Mythology of Angels. Introductory text and captions are by Gavan Daws.
• “Defying Time and History,” a provocative interview by Alberto Milián with Cuban American poet Ricardo Pau-Llosa.
• Ka-Shue (Letters Home), a full-length play by New Zealand poet-playwright Lynda Chanwai-Earle.

Extract

During the past five decades, Taiwan has evolved dramatically, from a little-known island to a nation-state with twenty-three million people and one of the largest economies in the world. Some of the best modern Chinese poetry comes from Taiwan, and the evolution of modern Taiwanese poetry tells the story of how the periphery has transformed itself into the frontier—an open, cosmopolitan zone where experimental leaps are possible and boundaries easily crossed to create a poetry “in the wild.”
—from Arthur Sze, introduction to interviews

216 pp., summer 2003 (15:1), $20
ISBN 978-0-8248-2743-0
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JSTOR