Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
Yu Xiuhua was born with cerebral palsy in the village of Hengdian, in Hubei province. At age six, she learned to walk with the help of crutches. Having difficulty in speaking and writing, she dropped out of school in the tenth grade. At age nineteen, her parents arranged her marriage with a man twelve years older than her. They have a son, but there was no love between the couple, and the man was almost constantly away working in the cities. Yu Xiuhua became well known in 2014 with her online poem ‘Crossing Half of China to Sleep with You’. In 2015, her debut book, Moonlight Rests on My Left Palm: Poems and Essays sold fifteen thousand copies in one day. Yu Xiuhua paid her husband 150000 yuan from her royalties to get her divorce in 2015. Disabled, scorned, isolated and unloved, she finds her “poetic living” through Internet literature. Frank, direct, passionate and unashamed, Yu Xiuhua’s poems unveiled the pretenses, repression and moralization of present-day urban Chinese where the aim is to climb the social ladder though social mobility is very difficult. The themes of her poetry are largely about love, affection, life lessons, her disability and the closed village from which she cannot escape. In ‘If All Things Are Interlocked with You’ Yu Xiuhua expresses an unanswered love, and its defiance. She ties the idea of love between people to the village; for her, loving both are the same. These two constantly recurring themes in Yu Xihua’s poetry are smoothly integrated and presented to give the poem its distinctive character. In 2017, The New York Times named her one of the eleven most courageous women from around the world.
If All Things Are Interlocked With You
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