Pains

Pains is renowned writer, publisher and editor Zhao Lihong’s newest collection of Chinese poetry in translation—a thematically interlinked meditation on the human body, aging, and the complexities of freedom.

In this collection of fifty-one poems, Zhao pulls in his focus and examines the universal in constrained microcosmic units of abstraction. The poet utilizes his decades of influence to pull ahead as a preeminent representative of contemporary Chinese poetry in all of its simplicity, and proves that limitation in itself may be a blessing.

Sample poetry from Pains

＂When did it happen:
black becoming white?
White as smoke ash, white as surviving snow,
white and rough and vacuous
as a sigh that cuts through a glacier.

Those silken threads
are still atop my head
thinning by the day.
When the wind blows, it still levitates.
The wind says, your earth still lives,
my breath cannot break you.＂