I. Argument of Situations -- Chronicles on Disappearance -- Whether a Marble Confirms Its Feeling of the Field -- If You Talk about Sadness, Fugue -- Foretaste of Disaster -- Almost Hour -- Satyr's Flute -- It Is Sad to See a Horse Sleeping -- Celadon -- Phantom Limb -- Birthday -- Aria of an Ebbing Scene -- II. Beethoven -- Preludes, a Blue Plume -- Incoherent Funeral March -- Fish -- Being and Time -- Chaconne -- Easier to Lift a Stone Than to Say Your Name -- Calligraphy -- Requiem -- Is the Sound of Thunder -- Utterance of a Folding Fan -- Through the Darkness -- Time the Stone Makes an Effort to Flower -- III. Vermeer: Thief -- A Difficult Apple -- A Bulldozer's American Dream -- Reliquary Evening -- Meditation on an Authentic China -- Red -- What Sustains in This Autumn Rain -- Comrade Mannequin -- IV. Serenade behind a Floating Stage -- In the Movie Theater -- Two Cannot -- Thin Air -- Lie Beyond -- La Traviata -- Tether -- Nude Descending a Staircase -- Training -- The Boy Is Sleeping -- Op. 64 in C# -- Acknowledgment: Erato -- Thanks for Reading -- Displaced Distance as a Red Berry.
Summary
"In Shangyang Fang's debut Burying the Mountain, saturated images of longing and loss rush through a portal of difficult beauty. Exiled begonias are "lit huge like eyes," as absence is translated into fire ants and snow, and a boy's desire is transfigured into the indifference of mountains and rivers. Lapping and twisting dimensions between a Song Dynasty ink-wash painting and a makeshift bedroom in Chengdu, the poems meditate, breach, and weave the crevices of intimacy, eros, and grief. Deeply immersed in the music of ancient Chinese poetry, Fang alloys political erasure, exile, remembrance, and death into a single brushstroke on the silk scroll, where our names are forgotten as paper boats on water"--
