Description: Before and since his enforced exile Yang Lian has been one of the most innovative and influential poets in China. Concentric Circles is a work focused on 'deep reality' and the nature of how humans understand that reality through the medium of language. Here fragments are aligned in patterns from poem to poem in ever-widening concentric structures.
Review Quotes: Those lonely Tang dynasty poets may be Yang's original blues brothers, but he's as much a modernist and symbolist in the vein of Mallarmé or Rimbaud [...] Yang Lian's work is rooted not in geography but in his own imagination [...] to exist in Yang's lines can be a gorgeous but frustrating adventure.' - Tim Kindseth, Time Magazine