• Highly anticipated debut collection by young Chinese poet
• Themes of youth, distance, queerness, and solitude.
• Music functions as a unifying language, and he adapts its forms--chaconne, aria, funeral march, requiem--to guide his meditations on the immigrant experience.
• Fang alternates seamlessly between his adopted English and his native Mandarin
• Louise Gluck is a huge fan
• Fang frequently reaches for both the Chinese traditions of poetry and painting and the European canons of literature, philosophy, and classical music for thematic guidance.
• He immigrated to the US by himself while still in high school
• Fang cuts to the bone of Chinese communist politics amid a personal identity crisis in "A Difficult Apple," which unfolds as a series of barroom arguments between lovers.