CONCENTRIC CIRCLES; TRANS. BY BRIAN HOLTON

the long version

"Yang Lian has written that Concentric Circles is 'the most important piece since I came out of China', and that it is emphatically not a political work, but instead a work focused on 'deep reality' and the nature of how humans understand that reality through the medium of language. The book, like its sections, uses a kind of collage, where many small fragments, each complete in itself, are aligned together in a series of patterns to form a grander mosaic: from line to line, poem to poem, cycle to cycle, in ever-widening concentric structures, 'to transform the diachronic life-experiences into the synchronic poetry'."--Jacket.