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In the Roar of the Machine

In the Roar of the Machine

by Zheng Xiaoqiong, translated from the Chinese by Eleanor Goodman

$18.00
$18.00
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Zheng Xiaoqiong is one of the most significant living Chinese poets whose unique poetics brings to the fore the plight of factory workers, women, and the rural poor in contemporary China, while situating these sociological concerns within a larger context that includes classical Chinese poetry, the voices of Zheng’s ancestors, the natural environment of southern China, and her native Huangma Mountains in central Sichuan.

Zheng spent nearly a decade working in the factories and warehouses of Guangdong province, one of the largest manufacturing centers in the world. Her poems give voice to the global economy’s human toll: the twelve-hour days on the assembly line, the endless mechanical din, the injuries and drudgery, the homesick murmur of far-flung dialects in the dorms.

Zheng is an advocate for worker’s and women’s rights, but what counters the roar of the machines in her poetry is the tenderness of her attention: “we / live, the nearby crowds that come and go / they live in my poetry, on paper, immense / yet frail, the tiny voices of these sentences / these fragile hearts.”

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Poets
ISBN: 9781681379388
Pages: 112
Publication Date:

Praise

A gripping collection.... Zheng Xiaoqiong’s poetry offers a sharp counter to the quiet pastorals and metaphysical musings that have long dominated the landscape of Chinese poetry in translation. These poems demand to be felt in the body and dare readers not to turn away from the blood, toil, and disease therein.
—Jury comments for ALTA’s 2023 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize (shortlisted)

At one level her work depicts the painful vulnerability of migrant workers within the grist of factory life, but she does so within a kind of industrial pastoral where machines, fire, and, above all, iron convulse into a terrifying sublime.
—Jonathan Stalling

A gripping collection…At once brutal and tender, Zheng Xiaoqiong’s poetry offers a sharp counter to the quiet pastorals and metaphysical musings that have long dominated the landscape of Chinese poetry in translation. These poems demand to be felt in the body and dare readers not to turn away from the blood, toil, and disease therein. In Goodman’s dauntless translation, the sweat of the assembly line, the hard edges of the employee ID card, and the steel-forged struggle shaping the lives of the working-class women and migrant laborers on whom Zheng has trained an incisive eye are brought into vivid relief.
—Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize, judges’ comments

Characterized by stark oppositions, personifications, and broken phrases, her work is razor-sharp in its observations…Her poems reveal how pervasive industrialization ensures that humans become part of the machine: nameless, a number on an assembly line, without rights.
—Silvia Marijnissen

At one level her work depicts the painful vulnerability of migrant workers within the grist of factory life, but she does so within a kind of industrial pastoral where machines, fire, and, above all, iron convulse into a terrifying sublime.
—Jonathan Stalling

One of the most significant living Chinese poets…Though she seems to come out of a world completely foreign to the traditional poetry reader, her work has a universal resonance. As such, her writing is more than a wellspring of meaning for each reader; it is an ocean that connects readers from worlds that might otherwise never meet.
—Simon Shieh, SupChina

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