POETRY
112 Pages, 6 x 9
Trade Paper, $16.00 (US $16.00) (CA $18.99)
Publication Date: April 2014
ISBN 9781609403508
Rights: WOR
Wings Press (Apr 2014)
"This is what the highest poetry is for, a bearing witness that translates, transforms, and humanizes; an act of imaginative creation that is simultaneously one of accurate transcription. In beautiful English that dances between poem and short story, text and documentary film, I am brought close to so many Chinese brothers and sisters in this world. Ten thousand voices that are our one voice. Their desires and despair, their horses and poets, their men and women, their clothes and fingers become part of who I am." —Fady Joudah, author, The Earth in the Attic
"Science says there is only so much water in our world: the same water recedes, recirculates, ravages, recovers, recultivates, returns, remembers, sometimes redeems. The ten thousand waves of these poems are moved by the countless tongues of those whose suffering and hope crest daily in the water making poison rainbows at their feet, in the dust becoming mud in their lungs, in the earthen jug saving coins for a grandchild’s schooling. These poems tell us their water is our water; their waves, our waves. That we must listen. Imagine. Make waves in return." —Rosemary Catacalos, Poet Laureate of Texas and author, Begin Here and Again for the First Time
"Wang Ping hears voices. Ten Thousand Waves is a collection of ghosts, and the voices of the dead and the living fall from the page into your lap. Her book could be called a snapshot of modern China, but that does not explain the way it supersedes geopolitical or economic definition. This collection shows China from the ground up. Everyone, even the soil, is speaking, and the voices all jostle for position over the background hum of China and America. Wang Ping has brought us all together, even if we don’t yet know it." —Neil Hilborn, author, Clatter
Ping Wang is a translator, a photographer, and an award-winning author of books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. She is an English professor at Macalester College and the recipient of the Eugene Kaden Award, the Asian American Studies Award, the Minnesota Book Award, and prizes from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bush Foundation, the McKnight Foundation and the Loft Literary Center, the Lannan Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, the New York State Council for the Arts, and the Minnesota State Arts Board. Her books include Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China, American Visa, The Dragon Emperor, and Of Flesh & Spirit. Ruthann Godollei is an illustrator who currently teaches printmaking at Macalester College. She has taught courses in two-dimensional design, women's and gender studies, political art, and performance and installation art. They both live in St. Paul, Minnesota.