Pee Poems

Lao Yang (trans. Joshua Edwards & Lynn Xu)

Chinese writer Lao Yang's Pee Poems go deep and dark--with deceptive lightness--into the metaphysical and the social, offering insight and humor along the way. Written over the past decade, this iconoclastic collection is the first of Yang's to be translated from Chinese into English.

Pee Poems is comprised of meditations, fragments, lyrics, and aphorisms, in dialogue with Chan hermit poets and Zen tricksters, with radical grassroots activism, experimental music, and Dada. Yang regards the body's most basic functions and desires as philosophical problems, restoring garbage and bladder-control to the field of politics, inhabiting both epochal and local time. In Pee Poems vocabulary fights itself, while impossible opposites are lovingly conjoined.

Joshua Edwards and Lynn Xu, poets both and friends of the author, translate Yang with brave tenderness, revealing a thinker whose observations are as simple and as rich as the languages we speak.

'These poems eat themselves. There’s nothing for me to say. Nonetheless I send them to everyone I know. They're all shaking their heads saying this is so good. These poems are so good I can't point, I can only send them out. They are out there. Truly, yay.' – Eileen Myles