Salsa

Translated by Steve Bradbury

From the publisher:

First published in 1999, Salsa has been Hsia Yü’s most successful collection of poetry, currently in its tenth printing, with thousands of copies sold. This stunning bilingual edition marks the first time the entire book is available in translation. As translator Steve Bradbury writes in a preface to the notes, Hsia Yü’s poems are “deliciously visceral, linguistically suggestive, and seem designed, as it were, to invite diverse interpretations.” She plays with language, punctuation and clichés, displaying her inventive sense of humor and roticisim, and incorporates phrases and images from sources as diverse as an anti-AIDS commercial, Jack Kerouac, the I Ching, a museum exhibition, a French-English dictionary and more.