A beautiful bilingual sequence of lyrical prose poems addressed to a distant love, and two illuminating interviews with the renown Chinese poet. "Xue Di's poetry is marked by an alert intelligence and a quiet authority. His work combines composure with force, lyric sensitivity with an expansive sense of scale. Rooted in attentiveness to the material world, these poems achieve resonance through precision rather than excess, offering a measured gravity rare in contemporary verse."-Tang Ming "Xue Di's poems are flamboyant, full of images, direct in their emotion, full of personal anguish but exuberantly sensual." -Keith Waldrop, 2009 National Book Award winner "Quiet in tone and intimate in stance, Xue Di's poetry listens its way toward the world. Through finely textured language and a depth of vision that tempers melancholy, his poems reveal how honest speech reconciles finite life with infinite time-and offers solace to human fragility." -Lu Xiake "Reading Xue Di's poetry, one is often reminded of Hölderlin-the poet Heidegger once called the poet of poets. Yet the resemblance is paradoxical rather than direct. Unlike classical Romanticism, Xue Di's work is infused with modern sensibility, where realism and conceptual depth coexist. In this sense, his poetry opens a broader horizon for contemporary poetic practice." -Yanzhi Molly