Poetry Readers Challenge discussion

I am going to refer people to Jenna's 2015 review of this book because I managed to read this book within the course of a day and left it for my brother to read. This book is a bilingual Chinese/English edition that includes a range from her early career to recent poems. I'll say that I found her poems from 1997 onward to be stronger than the earlier poems. The doll poems are very evocative. And It was interesting to look back at Jenna's review and see that she also felt that it was best read in a short time period. Though some poems are striking, I wasn't deeply drawn into most of them. Yet the cumulative effect was insight into her struggles. It's also interesting to me that I suspected that if I were to meet her I wouldn't like her. And yet, I felt a sympathy with her struggles despite them being very different from those I have had in life. Thus I have to say that she subtly strikes a universal cord. I'll add that it was a bit too subtle for me to feel a strong enough connection to want to keep and reread it.

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Thanks for posting this, Jen. For those wondering what has become of Liu Xia in these months since her husband's death, here are a couple recent articles I found about her. I'm glad people are keeping her in their thoughts this holiday season.

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/polici...
https://www.hongkongfp.com/2017/12/23...
https://pen.org/appeal-new-words-liao...

According to the South China Morning Post, "Concern for Liu Xia could be seen on the streets of Hong Kong as about 50 people took part in a demonstration to urge China to set her free.... The demonstrators marched to Beijing’s liaison office in Sai Wan, holding a brown chair – a reference to the chair the Nobel Prize committee left empty at the awards ceremony because Liu Xiaobo was in prison – and wearing Christmas hats with printed Chinese characters saying 'Free Liu Xia.'"

And this is Liu Xia's latest poem, which she included in a letter to her friend, the German Nobel laureate Herta Muller, earlier this month:

Dear Herta
I curl into a ball
As somebody knocks at the door
My neck starts to stiffen
But I can not leave
I speak to myself
I’m going mad
Too solitary
I have not the right to speech
To speak loudly
I live like a plant
I lie like a corpse

—Liu Xia

One reason Liu Xia's poetry is important to me is because it reminds me that there are places in the world, right now, at this moment in which we live at the beginning of the 21st century, where poetry is a matter of life and death.

Wow, thank you for bringing this to my attention. I hadn't looked into the current situation. What a tragedy. For anyone interested, here is the NY Times article about Liu Xiaobo's death. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/13/wo...

Thanks to both of you for posting these links.

Jenna-what powerful words:
there are places in the world, right now, at this moment in which we live at the beginning of the 21st century, where poetry is a matter of life and death.