{"product_id":"9789629968168","title":"Wild Geese Returning: Chinese Reversible Poems","description":"\u003cb\u003eA breathtaking introduction to Chinese multidirectional poems,  told through the story of Su Hui, the greatest writer of these poems who  embroidered a silk with 840 characters--equaling as many as 12,000  multidirectional poems--for her distant husband.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor nearly two thousand years, the condensed language of classical   Chinese has offered the possibility of writing poems that may be read   both forward and backward, producing entirely different creations. The   genre was known as the “flight of wild geese,” and the poems were often   symbolically or literally sent to a distant lover, in the hope that he   or she, like the migrating birds, would return.\u003cbr\u003e Its greatest  practitioner, and the focus of this critical anthology,  is Su Hui, a  woman who, in the fourth century, embroidered a silk for  her distant  husband consisting of a grid of 840 characters. No one has  ever fully  explored all of its possibilities, but it is estimated that  the  poem—and the poems within the poem—may be read as many as twelve   thousand ways. Su Hui herself said, “As it lingers aimlessly, twisting   and turning, it takes on a pattern of its own. No one but my beloved can   be sure of comprehending it.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e With examples ranging from the  third to the nineteenth centuries,  Michèle Métail brings the  scholarship of a Sinologist and the  playfulness of an avant-gardist to  this unique collection of perhaps the  most ancient of experimental  poems.","brand":"New York Review Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47184607314160,"sku":"9789629968168","price":15.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9789629968168_p0.jpg?v=1763681331","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9789629968168","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}