Zhongalish

Li Zhimin, a stellar poet and scholar from Guangzhou (China), has written a book of English language poems, bringing to this new language a fresh style and perspective, both delightful and edifying, poems that have a wary (and savvy) ingenuousness. Rather than write poems in the idiom of "the American," Li takes delight in foreignizing the familiar and making familiar the foreign. These are poems at the intersection of East and West, or perhaps better to say poems where the one melts into the other, creating a new kind of syncretism (what Li calls "Zhongalish"). -Charles Bernstein, University of Pennsylvania