“With this decades-spanning collection, Mang Ke is now visible to a general western audience, giving us a more complete picture of Chinese poetry during and since the Cultural Revolution. Mang Ke’s poems are radical in their immediacy, exploring the vexed space between public world and private experience, honing in on the gap between with sometimes uncanny directness. He delivers a simple, fact-based blow to Beijing policies in lines like: “My city, your wide eyes in the face of starving children / you are that cold / that dispassionate.” But a more common theme here is the nature of identity, or, to be specific, how we are never precisely ourselves. Such self-alienation appears in an early poem: “sometimes I go shout in the valley / and when the valley sends back my voice / my voice / shocks my heart,” and again in the long final poem in this book: “It’s not me seeing the sunlight / overrun your head like a swarm of bees / my seeing you falling asleep / is not me seeing you fall asleep.” Mang Ke’s work, from first to last, is bold, seemingly simple, yet syntactically unstable, strange. I don’t think I have ever read anything quite like it. We should be grateful to Lucas Klein for the excellent work he has done to make it available.”

—Rae Armantrout

“Mang Ke is a genius amongst contemporary Chinese poets. In a dark age, his early lyric poems were unparalleled—translucent, profound, and enchanting. They influenced an entire generation, and without a doubt our style of poetry was his invention.”

—Bei Dao

芒克，1950年生人，原名姜世偉，文革期間在河北省農村白洋澱下放時開始了寫作生涯。他在1978年成為中國第一份非官方文學雜誌《今天》的聯合創刊人，同時也是後來被稱作朦朧詩派的早期開山詩人之一。用一種閒適、充滿個人表達的作品來對抗被強加的毛澤東時代的寫作風格，通過一種具有畫面感的文學風格來承載個人的經驗與思想表達。他現在是一位抽象畫家，住在藝術家聚集的樂園－北京郊區的宋莊。

本書的編輯和主要譯者柯夏智（Lucas Klein）博士，2010年獲耶魯大學東亞語言及文學系博士學位，現為香港大學中文學院助理教授。柯夏智博士2008年參與合編了埃玆拉•龐德和厄内斯特•弗諾羅塞的著作 The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition；2011年與美國詩人 Clayton Eshleman 合譯出版北島詩歌選集，並連續兩年擔任香港國際詩歌之夜活動的英文翻譯編輯工作；2012年其譯作西川詩選《蚊子志》（Notes on the Mosquito）獲提名美國最佳翻譯書籍大獎，並獲得了 Lucien Stryk 亞洲文藝翻譯大獎。目前他正在從事晚唐詩人李商隱的翻譯工作。