Excerpt

Another Kind of Tenderness

Xue Di

Translated by Keith Waldrop, Forrest Gander, Stephen Thomas, Theodore Deppe and Sue Ellen Thompson with Hu Qian, Wang Ping, Hil Anderson, Waverly, and Iona Crook

2004 • 127 pp. • $15.00
ISBN: 0-9723331-4-2

Review in Rain Taxi by Lucas Klein; Vol. 10 No. 1, Spring 2005

Review in Providence Journal by Tom D'Evelyn;
February 13, 2005

Xue Di’s poetry is at once fierce and tender. The poems in this collection are charged with ambient details, each one so chosen out of desire and the impossible need to articulate the beloved throughout the perceptual world. The translations are stunning. This is gorgeous work.

—Peter Gizzi

"A loveless childhood/makes a man contagious all his life," Xue Di says in his poem, "Valentine’s Day." He goes on to chart love’s fevers, despairs, and obsessions in poems whose language is utterly original—and yes, contagious. Having survived a broken home, childhood abandonment, and China’s cultural revolution, he emerges as a vibrant proponent of life’s most essential joys and pleasures, captured in poems that are both lush and piercing.

—Sue Ellen Thompson

"Imagine you’re in unfolding layers of landscape," and there you’ll find the materials of Xue Di’s love poems, where lover, beloved, and love itself—at once lost, abandoned and desired—are prone to the elements that shape, shear or lend motion to. Here, "in the raw center of an open wound," there appears an open world.

—E. Tracy Grinnell

The voice of Xue Di in Another Kind of Tenderness is so full, so complete, that it manages to emerge whole from the poems even though they've been rendered into English by a large and disparate group of translators. This represents the greatest success of the translators, too: through their own divergent voices they form a chorus that harmonizes with the singular voice of the single poet. ... The unity and presence of Xue Di's voice is indeed truly remarkabe. In both Chinese and English, the language of the poems swings between tautness and sentimentalism, and yet one poet's vocal presence unites it all.

—Lucas Klein in Rain Taxi, vol. 10, no. 1, Spring 2005

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