Preface

When I first watched The Verse of Us, a documentary following six Chinese worker-poets, I came away carrying its weight: poems written beside assembly lines and deep underground, and the lives pressed hard against them. Only one of the six was a woman, and that stayed with me. A decade on, I wanted to know how worker-writers live now, and why they are still writing.

I looked for them on poetry accounts and worker forums, where people post after a shift. I found far more writing than I had expected, much of it by women. Little of it was read as literature. When it was noticed at all, it was for the lives behind it, not the writing.

This series is where that search led. I reach out to the writers I find; those who write back trust me with their work, and I translate it into English, so it can reach readers beyond the forums where it was first posted. This summer, with a school documentary grant, I filmed two of them as they worked and wrote, and that footage became Her Verse. The film follows their days; this series carries their line breaks: the raw images and sudden pauses a lens cannot hold.

Translation is how I read anything I love, a way of seeing what holds in another language. Often, halfway through a sentence, I find myself thinking of another book. This series is built on those moments. Each issue features one writer's work in Chinese and English, their answer to a question I ask every contributor, and a passage from another book their words called to mind.

These writers write after the shift ends, in hours that belong to no one but them. What they make in those hours is literature, and this series reads it that way.