Li Suo

In these four samples of Li Suo's poetry, her great subject matter is as always the pain, and pangs, of that dumb beast, the self: how we try and try, to overcome it, only to be confronted with the knowledge that it is here to stay. "Castor" conjures up those awful moments when we wish we'd spoken—and which, for years afterwards, we fill in what we might have said. "Dream" is about the fevered spaces of desire. "Kashgar "is an ode, and elegy, to one of China's ethnic pasts. "Wednesday’s Ship of Pearls", finally, gives us a glimpse of the possibility that the mundane, the bathetic, and the lowly might one day be redeemed in an epiphanic moment of arrival.