Of the Chinese avant-garde, Hsia Yü’s collections of poetry exemplify and perplex. The author of Pink Noise (2013), translated by Steve Bradbury, Yü had a new volume in translation released by Zephyr Press in 2014 — though originally published in 1999. A millennial dreamscape, Salsa asks its readers to follow the logic of order and the everyday so that they may become unfamiliar and distorted, the purl becoming unpurled. In the first poem of this collection, Yü predicts the journey of the book: “Lovers [fall] to the status of kin.” She thwarts expectations and familiar images of heartbreak.
