La poesia di Yang Lian coniuga una straordinaria irruenza espressiva di valenza sciamanica con la scrittura modernista di Pound, Eliot, William Carlos Williams e quella decadente di Baudelaire, senza mai smarrire l'esemplare misura della poesia classica cinese. L'energia metamorfica che percorre i suoi versi trasfigura il mondo naturale e storico secondo una morfologia antropocentrica, dove l'originale reinvenzione del meraviglioso ricorda la foga decontestualizzata della << scrittura automatica >> surrealista. (Tomaso Kemeny)
Yang Lian (Chinese: 楊煉 Yáng Liàn; born 22 February 1955) is a Swiss-Chinese poet associated with the Misty Poets and also with the Searching for Roots school. He was born in Bern, Switzerland in 1955 and raised in Beijing, where he attended primary school.
His education was interrupted by the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution after 1966. In 1974 he was sent to Changping county near Beijing to undergo 're-education through labor', where he undertook a variety of tasks including digging graves. In 1977, after the Cultural Revolution had ended and Mao Zedong had died, Yang returned to Beijing where he worked with the state broadcasting service.