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Fusion Kitsch
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Fusion Kitsch Paperback - 2001

by Hsia Yu; Steve Bradbury


From the publisher

One of the most provocative and cosmopolitan poets writing in Chinese today.

Hsia Y's frank and innovative treatment of gender and sexuality heralds the beginning of a much-awaited Chinese criture fminine. As critics have noted, Hsia Y may well be the first woman poet in Taiwan to have written about love and romance in a way that breaks radically from the conventions and constraints of traditional Chinese women's poetry. At a time when scholars in both Taiwan and North America are anxious to find a candidate to fill the long-vacant post of Chinese feminist poet, Hsia Y's feminism remains somewhat problematic, in that the poet herself has not only strongly resisted the label feminist but has insisted that her poetry is far more concerned with exploring the pleasures of the flesh and the pleasures of the text.

L'Empire la Fin de la Decadence

For Qiu Jin, Qing dynasty revolutionary martyr

A waltz not without its possibilities of mutual destruction

Like your revolution

I discover I've appeared in the guise of a man

Like you

Dancing toward the nadir

Nadir ad infinitum

To the endless verge of toppling

The empire at the end of its decadence

But I am merely an androgyne

In a gloomy salon

Releasing my splendor

My loud and sonorous masculinity

Born in Taiwan but now dividing her time between Paris and Taipei, Hsia Y makes a living as a song lyricist and translator. She is the author of four volumes of poetry, of which the most recent is Salsa (1999). She first came to prominence in the mid-1980s with the appearance of Beiwanglu, or Memoranda (1983), a self-published collection of poetry whose brassy and iconoclastic tone struck a deeply sympathetic cord in Taiwan's younger readers. Besides her popularity in Taiwan, Bei Ling devoted ten pages of an issue of his journal Tendencies to her poems, and Michelle Yeh and Goeran Malmqvist's anthology of Taiwan poetry, forthcoming from Columbia, will contain translations of 27 of Hsia Yu's poems.

Steve Bradbury translates Chinese literature and teaches American and Children's Litera

Details

  • Title Fusion Kitsch
  • Author Hsia Yu; Steve Bradbury
  • Binding Paperback
  • Edition First Printing
  • Pages 122
  • Publisher Zephyr Press (MA), Brookline, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
  • Date May 1, 2001
  • Features Dust Cover, Table of Contents
  • ISBN 9780939010646

About the author

Steven teaches at National Central University in Taipei, Taiwan. Zephyr published his translation of Hsia Yu's selected poetry-- Fusion Kitsch.