Impossible Paradise

The Poetry Book Society Translation Choice Spring 2026

May the stone steps and the deep-sleeping door summon

the camellias impossible paradise

and your face the impossible key

May the window shudder

May the notes be blue

and the candleflame shake unequivocally

(from May the Rain)

One of Taiwans most celebrated poets, Chen Yuhong draws on both Western and Asian literary traditions, inflected by her work as a translator of contemporary English-language women poets (Glück, Oswald, Duffy). This selection makes her art widely available in English for the first time.

Her award-winning translators, George OConnell and Diana Shi, carry across the richly metaphorical lexicon of her poems and their uncanny inhabitation of places both real and imagined, conjuring mood, angles of thought or light, animal presence, and the tides of the seasons.

In a world where much that seemed united has frayed, Chen Yuhongs finely balanced poems bring us news of other imagined worlds, and acknowledge the unexpected, its capacity to terrify or astonish.