Confucius said that poetry has a didactic function, i.e. to help individuals develop holistic personalities by morality demonstrated through personal influence. Thus, we give lectures that engage us in creating poetry, enabling us to maintain a balance between ideas, feelings, and expressions. Master Zhuang said that literature is a manifestation of Tao–a spontaneous and natural path, unrelated to anything artificial or pragmatic–and that the artist as well as the text are mirrors reflecting the true nature of things.

The phantasmagorical images in Yin Xiaoyuan’s poems, resonating with their historical traditions, refuse to unfold themselves in routine scenes. However strange they may look at first sight, they lead us to the enigmatic beginning of the world–‘The Hadean Eon’ when densities took shape, configuring the Mind to formulate all concepts. The metaphors have contrived a multi-real scenario, in which masculinity, a principle once appearing to be superior to human subjectivity, is questioned. The scenarios are networks deep in the universe made up of LED screens and mathematics (which happened before the concept of ‘time’ as we know it) which manifest as possibilities in other dimensions: ‘When you glanced away beyond tracks of time, suddenly he came into view, emerging from underneath surface of the ethereal, gleaming with vigor and tenacity. Those attributes of his do not perish with the body, or even with the soul. He is incarnated everywhere, in weather, energy, and even Zen.’ Like Octavio Paz said, ‘Light is time thinking about itself.’

The web of metaphors has intertwined particles into dense branches of various greenery in the rhetoric forests in which Nature manifests itself in the form of a threat: ‘mass will inevitably function as / A source of light … A universe suffused with gluons, photons, and mesons– … Just in the way souls combine with bodies, / They were blessed with gravity and speed.’ Instead of finding the originality of this poetry in its rhythm–the translation from Chinese has set barriers for us in doing so–we find originality in the concept of the poem itself. The author has given us indication of her ‘Quantum Ways, ’ and only by diving deep into the energy fields and the vibrations within could we find the beams of spooky voices and men classified into various archives by scores set according to their structures, so the reader imagines those supernormal, surrealist forms, navigating themselves across the spaces stretching within the poem.

Being the initiator of the Hermaphroditic Writing Movement, the poet extends her verses beyond the realms of transcendence and sublimation; the only way to read her poems is by fitting them into a mathematical universe, where the beauty of equations constructed this extraordinary poetic quality, in a space where parallel realities multiply and project themselves on everything: ‘The streets that have supplied you with all colors and sounds of life are in a parallel system to theirs.’

–Concha Garcia, Winner of prizes awarded by Universidad de Leon (1987), Barcarola (1988), Jaime Gil de Biedma (1995), and Dama de Baza.