
Exchanging Lover’s Ribs (10th Anniversary Edition)
Author: Yu-Hsuan Wu
Publisher: Zebra Crossing Press
Year: 2022
Language: Chinese
Pages: 204
ISBN: 978-986-06863-6-4
【About the Book】
If the original Exchanging Lover’s Ribs published ten years ago was a collection of poems that gathered countless inquiries scattered in the abyss of emotion—seeking belonging and meaning—then this anniversary edition listens instead for the subtle resonances and shifting traces between self-revelation and articulation. Here, each word carries the force of a specific trajectory of thought, and the spaces between neighboring phrases conceal tensions of varying density and textures of sound and rhythm. Yu-Hsuan Wu attempts to weave every poem into one extended composition, carefully tracing how a vertical and a horizontal line meet—and how their intersection generates a dramatic resonance.
【Author’s Note】
Two voices have haunted me like spells, recurring again and again in my ears. When I was in first grade, my mother gave me a hundred dollars on the morning of a school field trip, telling me I could buy whatever I wanted along the way. At the foot of the mountain, we passed a small blue truck piled high with cabbages. That evening, I came home, opened my backpack, and took out two cabbages. I told my mother, “I spent all the money—fifty dollars each.”
Startled, she asked, “You went on a field trip and came back with cabbages?” I replied in confusion, “The mountain-grown cabbages are sweet. That’s what the vendor said. So I bought them.” She continued: “Did your classmates or teachers buy cabbages too?” I shook my head. “No, just me.” I can never forget the tone of my mother’s surprise, because to me, buying cabbages to take home felt entirely natural. Only later did I realize: her surprise stemmed from disbelief that a seven-year-old child would still have the family in mind, even while having fun. Her tone opened a fissure between my action and myself, making me question what had once felt instinctive.
In fourth grade, a boy in my class looked at me and declared, “Your lips are too thin. You must be a heartless person.” My mother’s surprise, and that boy’s certainty—why did they cast such spells over me? Perhaps because I had no defense against a self I didn’t yet understand. And I could not easily rid myself of things that confused me. But I didn’t want to “unriddle” myself. I resisted the kind of summarizing perspective that trims off all frayed edges and deviations. So I’ve kept living in a nameless state, full of gaps.
Over the past ten years, publishers and unfamiliar readers have occasionally asked: “Can your first poetry collection be reprinted?” I always declined without hesitation. The former version of me has passed. I long only for the various distant forces that tease and then vanish into darkness, to refashion me anew. I am allergic to comfort. Once something becomes fixed, I want to break its bones—throw myself back into the vulnerability of a beginner, and explore the world anew, bearing all its possibilities.
I didn’t used to believe in fate. I stood against it, never imagining I would lose. But as I revisit my past, I keep encountering inevitability, destiny, the simple is-ness of the present moment. A few years ago, while wandering through the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, I found myself returning to a small painting—moonlight softly clasping a woman’s throat, as she lay peacefully, exposed to the boundless dark, savoring both the rupture and the pleasure of being.
Before leaving, I looked at the title beside the painting. It was Solitude. What draws me in, what resonates with me, always demands that I once again inhabit my own nature. Ten years have passed, and I remain unchanged: I cannot help but study with intensity whatever washes up from time’s tide. I cannot help but be moved by every slight shift in the world. I still pursue sensations untouched by thought, still approach pure colors and sounds. I love them for their refusal to signify—being nothing but themselves.
To know oneself is both an act of discovery and of creation. Now that I have moved far from the self I was ten years ago, the old poems in Exchanging Lover’s Ribs have once again become distant and fresh. I broke apart their original order, removed some poems, added others. I did not revise the wording within each poem, but instead reworked the relationships between them, exploring how the semantic space leans and balances as a whole. It is like re-editing each frame of a film so that the self-contained and sealed nature of every image is shaken by the context it inhabits, giving rise to a sense of flow and mutual response.
If the Exchanging Lover’s Ribs of ten years ago was a collection of poems scattered across the abyss of emotion in endless search for belonging, then this new edition listens instead to the subtle echoes and signs of transformation that arise between self-disclosure and articulation. Every word carries the force of a thought’s trajectory, and between each line lies a different density of tension, a different texture of sonic rhythm. I have tried to weave all the poems into a single poem, listening intently to how the intersection of a vertical and a horizontal line might generate a dramatic sound.
【Selected Works】
A Dream of Stone
were I the wind
at every turn in the road
I would want to go and see
see into the deepest valley
leave how many echoes echoing
those stones we know as love
fall
feel their way down every brook and rivulet
follow roads that know no end
altering themselves completely
who remembers the wind that went down to the sea
heartlessly
blowing a grain of sand
far
from the echoing valley
(Translated by Steve Bradbury)
【Reviews & Reflections】
“When I first received the manuscript of these poems, I was struck by their reckless intensity—just like the note tucked into the poetry envelope later on: ‘When I hugged you too tightly, I heard the sound of your bones breaking.’ While working on the design of this poetry collection, I read the poems over and over. There are people who live like this—as if they’re grabbing a burning flame with bare hands, refusing to resist the truth of the present moment; as if, in that blaze, they are using their whole being to know what it means to be alive.”
—Liao Yi-Chen, “Design Statement for the 10th Anniversary Edition of Exchanging Lover’s Ribs”
“The Exchanging Lover’s Ribs of ten years ago was a version of girlhood; the new edition is that of a woman approaching middle age. It moves from tactile, explosive, sensory stances—like ‘molten roses,’ ‘cool backs of hands,’ and ‘the glint of snowflakes’—into a continuous narrative that teeters on the edge of an abyss, as if revealing the intimate secrets of time itself. The sequencing between poems now feels more dialogic. Section I extends outward from external people, events, and relationships; Section II offers multifaceted meditations on love; Section III reads and pays tribute to a range of creators; and the final Section IV returns to the existence of daily life—as though witnessing how poetry has become Yu-Hsuan Wu’s secret path for tunneling deeper into life.”
