"I’m thrilled that Chen Du and Xisheng Chen have deftly rendered so much of Yan An’s beautiful work into English. Rock Arrangement builds a constellation of shimmering poems on the sky of its pages. We traverse the glimmering landscape, chasing the snow, the crow, the boulders.

Reading the compelling poems of Rock Arrangement, I feel like the wild kid who flies over the changing world of Yan An’s astute observances and leaps of imagination. In this collection, Chen Du and Xisheng Chen transport me through the cities and mountains of China, via trains and rivers, to experience the pipes, the peach blossoms, the peopled dreams, and the various manifestations of snow.

Rock Arrangement is Chinese poet Yan An’s resplendent mountain, which we are invited to ‘scale in person,’ to ‘climb up for a walk,’ to look, to touch ‘again and again.’ Chen Du and Xisheng Chen have translated this ‘serenely charming territory,’ with its poetic and geographical ‘edges and corners,’ for us to experience all that’s hanging in dark sky and ‘hidden in roots.’"

 

Dr. Anna Leahy, author of If in Some Cataclysm

“In this radiantly unsettling collection, Yan An turns form into fragment and echo into memory. Cradled in an unknown but uncannily familiar world, we are enveloped in shadows riddled with rivulets of light, where the natural world folds into geologic animations –– shimmers of the unconcealed. Chen Du & Xisheng Chen create poems that feel as if they were born American without losing their foreignness.”
 

Charles Bernstein, author of The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays & Comedies

“In these surreal landscapes, prize-winning contemporary Chinese poet Yan An gathers boulders and birds, dragons and dung beetles, peach blossoms and pythons, and mountains and mists where ‘red rocks . . . gunmetal gray rocks . . . steel-blue rocks . . . and even black rocks seem to slumber inside time.’ The reader is transported to a realm in which the ’real’ Qin Mountains ‘are forever in a place you can’t see or reach,’ and where a porcelain-firing master worker once ‘boiled down and dried nine rivers in the fire.’ Co-translators Chen Du and Xisheng Chen render these poems into an elastic and exciting English.”
 

Dr. Nancy Naomi Carlson, winner of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize

“Thanks to these bright new translations from Chen Du and Xisheng Chen, English language readers can now journey with Yan An through worlds of rivers and mountains, grasslands and lakes, and villages and suburbs to encounter feathers, mist, and boulders alongside aircraft, ancestors, strangers, and even ‘a stray bulldozer.’ These introspective poems delight and surprise, juxtaposing and reframing landscapes and experiences to explore timeless and boundless themes: loneliness, love, nature, memory, and, inevitably, change.”

 

Genevieve Kaplan, author of (aviary), editor of the Toad Press International chapbook series

“Yan An begins in the north, where a mountain plummets, the world changes, becomes flat, and the human-built world replaces the natural one. Life is ever-changing, ever-desperate, ever-plummeting. The project of the human, which has been to use the world, needs to be to live with that world, to find it once again, in constellations of beauty, in uncharted places, creating uncharted lives. Yan An’s project continues that of Shelley, of William Carlos Williams, of all the poets who have taken it as their role to make the world again, in and through words. The ‘views bewilder’ us, as they should, as we travel together with the rivers. In the final poem we find a man ’arranging rocks’ with heart and soul. The job may be unending and even possibly impossible, but it has to be done. The rocks are the world are the words. Yan An shows us what is necessary. Xisheng Chen and Chen Du have given us, in their elegant translation, another iteration of such an arrangement that becomes a window in which we see the past, the present, and the future we hope to create.”

 

Charles Alexander, author of Pushing Water and Time Being, director of Chax Press