Sun Tzu-Ping
Translated from the Taiwanese Mandarin by Nicholas Wong
1.
Unfamiliar names
Are a kind of precepts
I swallow thorns every day
And keep ovulating. At night, I am stridden over on an aisle
My ears, free-spirited
My body fed up with loitering in streets
Silence is a new sound
I practice listening by staying in line
An electronic note pauses on the third bar
A phantom train is arriving
The train conductor broadcasts something nostalgic
In the cold air, magnetic gold floats
The devil lurking at the corner of my eye makes a wish:
Let the pain blossom in the throat
Like all loves on the verge of extinction

2.
After the food has found its swallower
Please explain the body's phantoms one by one:
A time factory manufactures clean movie sets
A devil seduces the wrong commands
A bleeding hand touches the piano keys against the rule
Summer summons for a forest in light drizzles

Before all these:
Sunlight has patrolled our eyes
Language has experienced many munificent leaps
To end an evil plot in hiding

Since then:
The morning blue caresses fatigued windows
The secrets that took place in the dark
Finally close their eyes
To adopt an infantile hush
from the journal COLORADO REVIEW
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The poetry of Sun Tzu-Ping usually highlights the thoughts and feelings of its narrator caught between the paralysis caused by the urban mundane and his desire to break away from it. Often times fragmented and lyrical, Sun’s lines create an interestingly surrealistic feel, as well as an inescapable sense of abandonment.

Nicholas Wong on "Swallowing Thorns"
"A Conversation with Maureen N. McLane"

"Hungers are more complex perhaps than either satisfaction or joy. You're making me wonder too whether hungers can be retrospective as well as prospective: the envoi you quote contains that kind of affective and temporal whiplash and aims to transmit it, yes, Dickinsonianly (and there are so many brilliant envois one can riff on and from: Chaucer's, Pound's, troubadours')"

via LOS ANGELES  REVIEW OF BOOKS
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What Sparks Poetry:
Amaud Jamaul Johnson on Joy Priest's Horsepower


"Her poetic line stretches out like a horizon barely visible over the steering wheel. Of course, if you've never burned a tank of gas, cross-hatching city streets on a late spring Sunday afternoon, braiding the voices of Al Green or Smokey Robinson through the ribbons of heat rising from the asphalt, this book is an invitation to joyride."
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