Phenomenal. This is the type of book that makes me feel lucky that we have translators. Every poem pulled me in and I lingered far longer than necessary because I never wanted to leave. Accessible and with great depth, this collection is great for new-to-poetry readers and longtime fans of the form alike.

This collection was honestly a delight. There's something intimate about collaborated translations--I feel grappling with the poetics and the hard turns of one langauge into another is always a challange that takes like true care. Tracy K. Smith is a phenomenal poet utilizing what she knows instictively to communicate what exists in translation while also keeping to to Yi Lei's voice. The intro is lovely too because it speaks to the ever evolving conversation that transpires between energies exchanged to create with another and sync voices to really let poetry become. Like there is something so tender and lilting and light about Lei's work that was able to come through because Smith didn't claim the work as hard fact translation--she echoed out that this is how the poems came to her when she read them and was honoring her time with Yi Lei (and the memory of Yi Lei) . This collection of poems was remarkable and its hard to translate and maintain the original tonality but Smith did it. And Tracy also acknowledges her own excitement for another poet to interact with the translations to see what mutates and maintains and pulsates lovingly from the depths as the poetics moves along from one interpretation to another because people are different in how they come to language and think on where that langauge sits. This is my first time reading Yi Lei and I hope there are more translations of her work. She was an amazing poet from what I read in this collection. A ponderously lush and sparse and glowing voice threaded throughout

A fantastic translation by Tracy K. Smith of an extremely important poet. The care and consideration Smith puts into this translation us evident from the start, and the inclusion of the original Mandarin adds a significant amount of context to the work.