Starve the Poets!: Selected Poems (Paperback)

Yi Sha is the most controversial Chinese poet of the past 20 years, a member of the extreme avant-garde whose work has changed the face of Chinese poetry. His anti-lyrical poetry is minimal, unadorned - dramatising with facts, not painting emotional pictures - in plain, colloquial language. His poems present pared-down descriptions of seemingly banal incidents, or dramatic incidents described in an ironically banal manner. Born in the southern Chinese city of Chengdu in 1966 three days after the start of the Cultural Revolution, he grew up in the Maoist era. He came to prominence as a writer in the 1990s, publishing fiction and essays as well as poetry, all of which have been criticised, attacked and even reviled by detractors including many fellow writers.No Chinese poet before him has come under such concentrated attack. Although Yi Sha is a literature professor, his poetry is "anti-academic" in flavour and has never been accepted in the official Chinese literary mainstream. He has refused to join any official Chinese writers organisation, which has made him a "non-official poet", and his writing has been imitated by still younger poets. Those who condemn Yi Sha say he has damaged the Chinese poetic tradition, while his admirers believe that he has given forceful expression_r to the current realities of China and extended the appeal of poetry to new audiences.

Yi Sha was born in 1966 in Chengdu, and moved with his family at the age of two to the central Chinese city of Xi'an in Shaanxi province. He published his first poems while still at school, studied Chinese at Beijing Normal University, and became a noted figure among China's university student poets. He has worked on literary magazines, as a TV presenter and independent publisher, and is now an assistant professor at the Xi'an International Studies University.In 1988 he published a mimeographed first collection, Lonely Street, but found an official publisher for his next collection, Starve the Poets! (1994). His other poetry and prose titles have included Vagabond Wharves (1996), This Devil Yi Sha (1998), The Bastard's Songs (1999), Blaspheming Idols (1999), Fashion Assassin (2000), Critique of 10 Poets (2001), My Hero (2003), Whoever Hurts, Nows (2005) and Shameless Are the Ignorant (2005). His poetry has been translated into several languages, but he has been refused permission to give readings outside China on a number of occasions. His Selected Short Poems was published in a bilingual Chinese-English edition in Hong Kong in 2003. Starve the Poets! (Bloodaxe Books, 2008) is his first English publication outside China.