Line and Light

A reading and discussion of poems from Jeffrey Yang’s new book that circles themes of ecology, shadow puppetry, ancestry, Daoist thought, translation, time, and art. Kyoo Lee writes, “Lines we draw and light we receive become part of a new logos of regeneration explored in this constellation of lyrical visions on the move. A ground-breaking work of what we might call estuary poetics, Line and Light deftly draws together senses and sensations that pass through the myriad thresholds of spacetime both geospecial and epochal. Along the way, with Jeffrey Yang, a bard of our times, we, too, come to rediscover artistry in ancestry and vice versa, such a resilient nexus in fluxus in times of ecological disaster and hope.”

Jeffrey Yang is the author of four books of poetry: Hey, Marfa (winner of the Southwest Book Award); Vanishing-Line; An Aquarium (winner of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award), and the recently published Line and Light. He is the translator of Bei Dao’s autobiography City Gate, Open Up; Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Liu Xiaobo’s June Fourth Elegies; Ahmatjan Osman’s Uyghurland, the Farthest Exile; and Su Shi’s East Slope. He has edited the poetry anthologies Birds, Beasts, and Seas and Time of Grief, a volume of Walt Whitman’s poetry and prose, The Sea Is a Continual Miracle, and an expanded edition of Mary Oppen’s Meaning a Life: An Autobiography. Yang was a 2017–2018 DAAD artist-in-residence in Berlin. He is the editor-at-large for New Directions Publishing.