In “Say What You Won’t,” Canaan Morse reviews Enough for A Dream 够一梦,  Xi Chuan’s newest collection of poems in Chinese. Morse writes:

Local language allows these poems to represent their respective subjects with painful honesty—not through invective, but rather through a soft, playful sarcasm that appears to be one of the hallmarks of Xi Chuan’s work. Nearly every poetic statement in the first section of Enough is satirical, invented or absurd, yet can provide the reader truly useful information. The mechanism of irony, which is merciless as only humor can be, slips the knife between the ribs and twists it.

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In the high-energy environment of the poem, any image when first introduced is made vast by its potential significance. Xi Chuan brings those images in as they are, and then, through a simple repetition or a partial denial, deflates them. The reader becomes spectator to a farcical event, and is tempted to laugh. This ironical disbelief of the narrator’s own discourse appears with variations so often throughout the poems in Enough for a Dream, we should be able to consider it characteristic of Xi Chuan’s poetic voice.

Click the image above to read the whole piece, along with a poem of Morse’s in Chinese in echo of one of Xi Chuan’s.