Starve the Poets: Selected Poems

Yi Sha is the most controversial Chinese poet of the past 20 years, a member of the extreme avant-garde whose work has changed the face of Chinese poetry. His anti-lyrical poetry is minimal, unadorned, - dramatizing with facts, not painting emotional pictures - in plain, colloquial language. His poems present pared-down descriptions of seemingly banal incidents, or dramatic incidents described in an ironically banal manner. Born in the southern Chinese city of Chengdu in 1966 three days after the start of the Cultural Revolution, he grew up in the Maoist era. He came to prominence as a writer in the 1990s, publishing fiction and essays as well as poetry, all of which have been criticized, attacked, and reviled by detractors, including many fellow writers.