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