【About the Book】

 

Myth is the undercurrent beneath the present world.

 

From 2020 to 2022, Yu-Hsuan Wu lived among the Amis Indigenous Tribe along the Xiuguluan River, learning to chant, till the earth, sow seeds, brew millet wine, cure meat, gather wild greens, weave headpieces, observe traditional mourning rituals, and perform sacred offerings with rice wine. Each time they opened new land in the wild, the first step was to light a fire. Oduy from Cidal Tribe said: “You have to start a fire. There must be smoke—for the ancestors to receive our message.”

​

Yu-Hsuan grew curious: why do the Amis believe that every object contains a form of divinity? What traces have Amis myths and legends left on the landscape and their people? And what new myths are being created through their everyday lives? ​

​

This photography and poetry collection, I Set Fire in the Field After Sunset, contains twenty chapters, each portraying one Amis village Yu-Hsuan Wu visited. Each chapter begins with a local myth or place-based legend, followed by photographs capturing the exact moment her heart was struck by that place. Then come poems—written when a myth called her into the fate of one of its characters, or when her own existence was pulled into the mythic current. These poems strive to bring the undercurrent to the surface: the intimacy between humans and all living things, the trust that nature holds a path toward you, just as you hold a path for nature.

 

​

【Author’s Note】

 

On a morning close to my child’s birth, I dreamed of these four words: “I Set Fire in the Field After Sunset.” I imagined the light fading, and someone—me—stepping into the damp, chilled earth to start a fire. No matter how slow or clumsy my movements, from afar it seemed as if I had delayed dusk itself. The flame I sparked was even wilder than twilight—even if no one was watching.

 

This is the life I want. And everything that rises from beneath the earth—I am willing to move with them, breath for breath.

​

​

【Selected Works】

 

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

Staying

 

I want to always recognize you
when you utter the word vast,
accidentally dislodging too many stones.

 

I stand at the foot of the crumbling cliff,
trying to identify you
in the traces of feeling left behind.

 

I pick up a stone—
and feel you’ve walked far.
I pick up the 736th stone—
and feel you no longer
remember being here.

 

Finally, I can rest
and build a small, pale stone house
without asking you
to step inside.

 

Now,
my hands are empty,
ready to follow winter—
to spark a fire, burn wood,
and warm this home.

 

​

​
This poem was also published in the art and literary magazine Inverted Syntax (2022)

​

 

 

【Review & Reflection】

 

“Reading Yu-Hsuan Wu’s poetry always feels wild—charged with a vast, untamed ambition that refuses domestication, always pushing against more boundaries. Like a beast in motion, she never ceases learning: learning to weave water, to weave fire, to weave all things. As Ursula K. Le Guin once said, poetry is all of Yu-Hsuan Wu’s jungle, all of her wilderness, and even all of her civilization and all of her contemporary world. It’s as if she lives at the center of time, as if she stands in her own light—bearing witness to what she declares in the afterword of I Set Fire in the Field After Sunset: ‘Every being carries divinity.’”

 

—Shen Mian, “When Poetry Returns to Myth”