2019

Republic of Apples,
Democracy of Oranges
New Eco-poetry from China
and the United States

Guest-edited by
Tony Barnstone and Ming Di
Series Editor Frank Stewart
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Republic of Apples, Democracy of Oranges presents nearly 100 poets and translators from China and the U.S.—the two countries most responsible for global carbon dioxide emissions and the primary contributors to extreme climate change. These poetic voices express the altered relationship that now exists between the human and non-human worlds, a situation in which we witness every day the ways environmental destruction is harming our emotions, imaginations, and intellects.

 “What can poetry say about our place in the natural world today?” ecologically minded poets ask. “How do we express this new reality in art or sing about it in poetry?” And, as poet Forrest Gander wonders, “how might syntax, line break, or the shape of the poem on the page express an ecological ethics?”

Eco-poetry freely searches for possible answers. Sichuan poet Sun Wenbo writes:

I feel so liberated I start writing about
the republic of apples and democracy of oranges. When I see apples have not become tanks, oranges not bombs,
I know I've not become a slave of words after all.

Sun Wenbo

The Chinese poets are from throughout the PRC and Taiwan, both minority and majority writers, from big cities and rural provinces, such as Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture and Xinjiang Uyghur, Tibet, and Inner Mongolia Autonomous Regions. The American poets are both emerging and established, from towns and cities across the U.S.

Included are images by photographer Linda Butler that document the Three Gorges Dam, a project on the Yangtze River, and the effects of Hurricane Katrina on the Mississippi River Basin.

For more information, see our blog on this volume.

Displaced Lives
Fiction, Poetry, Memoirs, and
Plays from Four Continents

Guest-edited by
Alok Bhalla and Ming Di
Series Editor Frank Stewart

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The dislocation of people in the twenty-first century has been unprecedented. At the end of 2019, over 260 million people were living outside their countries of birth. Some are voluntary migrants, but others have been forced to relocate by violence, wars, persecution, hunger, or extreme weather events. Millions more are mentally and spiritually uprooted and isolated because of PTSD, depression, addiction, and aging. The question of how they are perceived and treated should be everyone’s concern.

The displaced are a statistical category, but their lives, emotions, and hopes are made vividly real in these powerful and intimate works of literature by more than thirty writers from four continents. Many of the authors are themselves exiles, members of immigrant families, or witnesses to the effects of displacement on loved ones. Authors are from Bangladesh, Canada, Cuba, China, Germany, India, Ireland, Iran, Israel, Macedonia, Mexico, the Netherlands, Pakistan, the Philippines, Romania, Russia, South Africa, Spain, and the U.S.

The art selections in the volume are from Majnu Ka Tilla Diaries, a portfolio by photographer Serena Chopra.

A mother and her child with all their belongings.  Majnu Ka Tilla Diaries (1), 2012. Serena Chopra © courtesy sepiaEYE

Four Generations of a Tibetan Family. Majnu Ka Tilla Diaries (007), 2007. Serena Chopra © courtesy sepiaEYE

ISBN 978-0-8248-8288-4
Project Muse
ebook edition