Book Review: His Days Go By the Way Her Years by Ye Mimi

His Days Go By the Way Her Years
Poems by Ye Mimi, translated by Steve Bradbury
Anomalous Press, 2013
ISBN: 978-1939781215
Paper: $10; ebook: $5; 38pp.
Reviewed by Tim Lantz

In this bilingual chapbook of ten poems, a finalist in Anomalous Press’s chapbook contest, Taiwanese poet Ye Mimi smashes together the slightly off real and the gnomic. Verbing nouns and playing with the literality of everyday expressions, she takes grammatical shortcuts through her lines. As the title suggests, the lives of a recurring “she” and “he” are measured in terms of motion toward and away from each other. In the title poem,

the au contraire of plentiful is he

………………………………………………

she hairs his chest he heartens her sweetheart

one day every living soul will turn to soil

he ocean fleets a vessel

she mountain passes a night

Sometimes the pair merges, becoming other pronouns, asking, “Who is at the boundary of whom?”

Ye’s poems are also visually thrilling. She uses slashes, a grawlix (“blurt @&@#”), Mandarin phonetic symbols, and even empty boxes of Unicode characters not displayed correctly. These elements add to the material accumulations and growing-obsolete technologies scattered throughout the poems. Like the phone booths in “A Moth Laid Its Eggs in My Armpit, and Then It Died,” the visuals offer other ways to communicate.

The chapbook was short-listed for the 2014 Best Translated Book Award, and for good reason. Steve Bradbury does a spectacular job Englishing Ye’s rousing syntax and rhythm—for example, from “The More Car the More Far”:

One day they drag a railroad track over for her, teach her how to belch black smoke from her fontanelles.

So then she cars up. Facing the track, facing the eaves.

I am precise. I am naughty. I am gravity.

For those who can read Chinese and English, part of the fun of the book is going back and forth between the languages to see how the poems work in both and how one has become the other (and thus an argument for including the original language in other translated works). In both languages, His Days Go By the Way Her Years is a beautifully weird book.

Tim Lantz is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Kansas. His writing has appeared in alice blue, DIAGRAM, Prick of the Spindle, and other publications and has been translated into Chinese, German, and Korean.