The Book of Jade (Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize Library)

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This is an unforgettable book. Wang employs a strange and strangely disturbing, invented form, something between a psalm and a prose poem. In clipped paragraphs, she conducts us through narratives that start as stories and end in dreamlike images. This device could, in less assured hands, become dull with repetition. Instead, the poet sharpens the details in each piece to almost unbearable points. Although the autobiographical and historical facts that underpin the book are themselves striking and often tragic--Wang, born in China, saw and heard of numbing human cruelties--the overall effect is to exalt the human capacity to survive, and even to love, despite circumstances. Winner of the Nicholas Roerich poetry prize, this book and this poet deserve great attention. Patricia Monaghan
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Book Description
Winner of the 15th annual Nicholas Roerich Poetry PrizeSelected from more than 900 manu-scripts, this collection possesses unusual thematic coherence and intimacy. Many poems are set in the author_s-native China. They explore family history and dynamics set against the oppressive Cultural Revolution.Yun Wang, born in a small town in Southwest China in 1964, came to the U.S. to study physics in 1985. She is an assistant professor specializing in theoretical cosmology at the University of Oklahoma. This is her first full-length collection.


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Selected from more than 900 entries to the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize, The Book of Jade explores family history and dynamics within China's volatile political climate. The book is an epic of a multi-dimensional personality -- poet, scientist, mother, and child; experiences and meditations are drawn from each, woven together, and hewn into a passionate view of the world. The book contains nine parts, five of which are sequence poems that contain nine poems each in a threefold structure. This form reflects Yun Wang's obsession with symmetry and hidden meanings. "The Book of Mirrors" begins with an exploration into various cosmologies through reality, myth, and science. "Loss in Spring" recollects her early childhood in China. "Beneath the Pahnted Shrine" exposes tragedies of the poet's less fortunate peers. "The Book of Scarlet" is a search for the mystery of beauty and inspiration. Subsequent parts describe her transition to life in America and present the world from several intimate angles, concluding with a celebration of the enduring love between mother and child and the boundless curiosity that redeems the human race.a


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