Ming Di is a poet and translator born in China, currently living in the US. The author of six books of poetry in Chinese and one in collaborative translation, River Merchant’s Wife (Marick Press, 2012), she is working on her first book of poems in English about her father who died of cancer during the pandemic and about her hometown, Sandouping (Three Star Slope), which disappeared from the map in 1994—submerged by the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River.
I was struck by one of the poems Liu Xia released a few days before her husband, Liu Xiaobo, died of cancer as a political prisoner in China. One line in particular hovered in my dreams until one morn...
What One Leaf Tells
In the wind, questions to heaven bang the white poplar. Answers fracture –
a thousand white leaves. A thousand blameless mouths. A thousand. Ten thousand colorless excuses;
I pi...