Last month was Poetry Month (T.S. Eliot called April “the cruellest month”), and SupChina ran a host of short essays on Chinese poetry.

As part of the series, Simon Shieh wrote about Zheng Xiaoqiong
郑小琼:

Zheng is, by any measure, an anomaly. When she won the Liqun Literary Prize in 2007, she was completely unknown in the literary world. Now, she is a seminal figure in the emerging genre of migrant worker poetry and one of the most significant living Chinese poets, as her recent nomination for the Newman Prize attests.

Zheng’s poetry is well-known for its stylistic complexity. But what I find most interesting in her poetry is the relationship between two seemingly opposed landscapes: the classic pastoral landscape on the one hand and the landscape of mass-production on the other.

Shieh also quotes a poem by Zheng alongside its translation into English by Samantha Toh.

Click here to read the whole article.