Join us for a bilingual (Mandarin Chinese, English) reading of Yen Ai-Lin’s 顏艾琳 poetry collection Bone Skin Flesh 骨皮肉, newly published in a bilingual edition, followed by discussion between the poet, Dr Aoife Cantrill, Dr Bingbing Shi and Samir Ng Sum Leung.

(Source: Balestier Press) First published in Chinese in 1997, Bone Skin Flesh now appears in a bilingual edition with its first English translation by Jenn Marie Nunes. A landmark in contemporary Taiwanese poetry, these poems revel in the feminine – its desires, violences, and contradictions – through language that is visceral, imagistic and unrelenting. Here the body is never just metaphor: truth is spit, the sky a leaking breast, the moon a tongue pressed to skyscrapers. Women recur – mother, lover, crone – mythic and ordinary, tender and grotesque. Infused with pink spirit and kin to the Gurlesque, Yen’s work claims the feminine as a site of rebellion, pleasure, and creation. Urgent and intimate, Bone Skin Flesh is poetry that demands not only to be read, but lived with.

Yen Ai-Lin 顏艾琳 is a Taiwanese poet whose work moves between modern poetry, lyrical prose, and cultural criticism. She was the first female poet in Taiwan to publish a sustained series of erotic poems—works that ignited wide discussions on gender and desire. Her writing, shaped by diverse influences, has been honored with the National Outstanding Young Poet Award, the Ministry of Culture’s Outstanding Award for New Poem Creation, the Genesis Poetry Magazine 35th Anniversary Poet Award, the inaugural Taipei Literature Award, the Wu Zhuoliu New Poetry Award, and more.