Join co-translators James Shea and Dorothy Tse as they share Hong Kong poetry from Moving a Stone: Selected Poems of Yam Gong (Zephyr Press) at The Ivy Bookshop on June 25 at 2:00 p.m. Yam Gong is a leading Hong Kong poet who blends philosophical inquiry with everyday life. Using shifting tonal registers, he refashions borrowed language, including English song lyrics, Cantonese wordplay, Chinese folk stories, news reports, prayers, and slang. Born in 1949, Yam Gong (pen name of Lau Yee-ching) is widely respected in both experimental and traditionalist circles in Hong Kong’s literary community. This bilingual volume is the first book-length collection of Yam Gong’s poems in English, drawing from his most important work over the past forty years.

This event will be moderated by Baltimore-based poet Don Berger.

Click here to preorder Moving a Stone!

Born in 1949, Yam Gong is a celebrated Hong Kong poet whose honors include the Hong Kong Youth Literature Award, the Workers’ Literature Award, and the Hong Kong Biennial Award for Chinese Literature for his first book And So You Look at Festival Lights along the Street (1997). He later published an extended edition of this collection, titled And So Moving a Stone You Look at Festival Lights along the Street (2010).

James Shea is the author of two poetry collections, The Lost Novel and Star in the Eye, both from Fence Books. Recipient of grants from the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program, Hong Kong Arts Development Council, and National Endowment for the Arts, he is the director of the Creative and Professional Writing Program at Hong Kong Baptist University.

Dorothy Tse is a Hong Kong fiction writer whose books include Owlish and So Black. Tse has received the Hong Kong Book Prize, Unitas New Fiction Writers’ Award (Taiwan), and the Hong Kong Award for Creative Writing in Chinese. She has been a resident at Art Omi, the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, and the Vermont Studio Center.

Donald Berger grew up in New York and Massachusetts, and attended the University of Massachusetts and the University of Washington.  He is the author of The Long Time, a bilingual edition in English and German (Wallstein Press, Goettingen,Germany),  Quality Hill (Lost Roads Publishers) and The Cream-Filled Muse (Fledermaus Press).  His poems and prose have appeared in The New Republic, Slate, Conjunctions, New American Writing, Colorado Review, Fence, Ironwood, The Iowa Review, The Massachusetts Review, and other magazines including some from Berlin, Leipzig, Budapest, Hong Kong and mainland China  He has taught at the University of Maryland and Montgomery College and currently teaches in the University Writing Program at Johns Hopkins University. 

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