Lantern Puzzle

by Ye Chun

Poetry. Asian American Studies. Berkshire Prize for First or Second Book, chosen by D. A. Powell. Entranced by time and location and the body's longings, this is a book of self-translation. Each poem has gone through a transmigration process, as the poet negotiates between her native Chinese and her adopted English, attempting to condense, distill, and expand seeing and understanding.

Genres: Poetry

68 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2015

About the author

Ye Chun / 叶春 (Surname: Ye) is a bilingual Chinese American writer and literary translator. She was born in Luoyang, China and came to the U.S. in 1999. She received an MFA in Poetry from the University of Virginia and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Missouri. She is the author of Straw Dogs of the Universe (a novel), Hao (stories), two books of poetry, Travel Over Water and Lantern Puzzle, and a novel in Chinese,《海上的桃树》(Peach Tree in the Sea).
She has published four volumes of translations, including Ripened Wheat: Selected Poems of Hai Zi, shortlisted for the 2016 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Award, and Long River: Poems by Yang Jian. Her translations of Li-Young Lee's Behind My Eyes and Undressing,《眼睛后面: 李立扬诗歌》, and Galway Kinnell's The Book of Nightmares,《梦魇之书》, came out from People's Literature Publishing House in 2019 and 2021.
A recipient of an NEA Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, and three Pushcart Prizes, she is an associate professor at Providence College.

Reviews

[D.A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

At night I'm small,
soft, and ready
to be glowed upon.

You are the lanterns
of a heart that loves,
loves.

You are twelve little
burning moons.

(from "Roses," Ye Chun)


These poems unfold delicately like a moth emerging from the quiet of its cocoon, brilliant and iridescent. As if with that same moth's compound eye, the poems see deeply into small things: a chrysanthemum's petals in the sun, a lamp in the window, embroidered pillows and lingerie. Ye Chun is a poet of extraordinary precision and quiet lyric intensity. Here is a mind open to the world's mysteries and beauty.

[Shawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Lantern Puzzle opens with an earthquake and ends on a breath, and from tremor to murmur a lyric history unfolds” writes poet and scholar Carolyn Forché in her opening comments of the book. Forché’s words also give a taste, in my experience, of the great emotional and geographical range Ye Chun’s work possesses. The poems in Lantern Puzzle offer their readers luminal meditative spaces to regard, reflect and engage with the poems’ respective occasions. The book’s four sections (Map, Amulet, Almanac, and Window) address themes of origins, familial bonds, dislocation, history, and love with zest and complexity. Their terse lyricism, arresting imagery, and formal acumen work with a clarity of line and phrase to disclose hidden moments of the world without commodifying them. There is great empathy, compassion and understanding for the human condition in these poems their places, situations and lives—all in a language that renders the pulse of one bearing witness to and living in the momentary, with its vast scale of tone and emotion. This is a poetry that sounds out across this reader’s own experience and confirms, as it fulfills, the human.

[David Anthony Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ye Chun paints her poetry in an English that refers both to her life and family history in China and also to the pictorial language of that land. She weaves the personal, the political, and the natural in a fabric that speaks quietly but profoundly. Nowhere do I read or hear a misstep, just the ebb and flow of the river of her experience.

[Dustin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This work of a fellow Mizzou Tiger (didn't know her though) was a new experience -- my first foray into Chinese poetry. Overall, the book didn't resonate with me, but there's a possibility it was beyond me in some ways. Definitely liked the latter half much better.

Dustin Renwick
Author, "Beyond the Gray Leaf"