Bed

Wu Ang (trans. Cecily Chen)

Written in Beijing around the turn of the millennium, Bed by Wu Ang is a collection that glides between dreamlike personas, charged observation, and casual despair. In Wu Ang’s wry, charismatic gaze, bored lovers turn into furniture, hospitals harbor shorts-stealing crocodiles, and the poet herself becomes a “female cockroach.” Mordant, unapologetic, and “extravagant,” Wu Ang’s necessary voice is collected here in a bilingual edition for the first time, translated by Cecily Chen.

'Held now by Wu Ang’s Bed, we enter the dreamscape otherworld of poetic translation: the alternate linguistic reality of poetry that translation inevitably produces but too often shrouds under the pretense of equivalence. Instead, Bed begins, “Please could you bury me in a mirror / So I know who lingers before my grave.” Cecily Chen reveals how every translation is essentially a ghost story, and in the English surreality she creates from Wu Ang’s Chinese poems, the uncanny specters of translingual, transcultural disfigurement and defamiliarization that roam these pages – such as “Marilynne Monro,” “Donte of Firenzia,” a philosopher called “Cant,” and the poet “Wu Ang” herself, referred to in third person and romanized – ultimately offer a form of rewriting global Capitalism’s preordained scripts of work, rent and romance. In Bed, Wu Ang tries and tosses out these scripts and, through Chen, finds a form of herself in an English that’s sharp, sly and strange enough that she can write, in indelible, jet-black ink on the sheets, “I was here – ”' – Mia You