Yang, Lao: Pee Poems

Translated from the Chinese by Joshua Edwards & Lynn Xu (Circumference Books, paperback)

Publication Date: March 15, 2022

Publisher Marketing: Chinese writer Lao Yang's PEE POEMS go deep and dark—with deceptive lightness—into the metaphysical and the social, offering insight and humor along the way. Written over the past decade, this iconoclastic collection is the first of Yang's to be translated from Chinese into English.

PEE POEMS is comprised of meditations, fragments, lyrics, and aphorisms, in dialogue with Chan hermit poets and Zen tricksters, with radical grassroots activism, experimental music, and Dada. Yang regards the body's most basic functions and desires as philosophical problems, restoring garbage and bladder-control to the field of politics, inhabiting both epochal and local time. In PEE POEMS vocabulary fights itself, while impossible opposites are lovingly conjoined.

Joshua Edwards and Lynn Xu, poets both and friends of the author, translate Yang with brave tenderness, revealing a thinker whose observations are as simple and as rich as the languages we speak.

"In the mythos of Chinese ethnogenesis, the sage king Yu countered the great flood by diverting it into rural irrigation. The contemporary Chinese poet Lao Yang adopts a more irreverent strategy for liquid transport, urination (with an emphasis on the nation). This apocalyptic book reads like the waste journals of a survivalist on the run from carnivorous leviathans, God, and the Chinese state. Calling to mind the work of Raul Zurita and Kim Hyesoon, Yang's PEE POEMS consist of crystalline scatalogy, expressions of a profane piety. I can't quite recall reading another poetry book that felt simultaneously this elemental and funny."—Ken Chen

"In these irreverent poems, we see a fearless spirit in confronting the darkness and absurdity around the poet. An extraordinary collection."—Ha Jin

"Burrowing trinkets of sound and fury, these poems shoot inward like velvet claws, evoking a courageous loneliness and despair that spits out flowers in return."—Rob Mazurek

"These poems eat themselves. There's nothing for me to say. Nonetheless I send them to everyone I know. They're all shaking their heads saying this is so good. These poems are so good I can't point, I can only send them out. They are out there. Truly, yay."—Eileen Myles

"These crisp, lean and clean words of Yang conjure up a landscape situated in uncertain times and with movable spiritual boundaries. Determined to resist the powerful tides of propaganda from political and commercial life, Yang's poems here, like his struggle in the real world, intrigue, provoke and challenge simultaneously."—Zhang Er