
Time Wheel and Heart Track
by Cao Xingzhen
About This Novel
This collection of poems uses the twenty-four solar terms as the gears and the altar of earth as the furnace to create a heterogeneous time and space where bronze tripods, pottery figurines, mycelium and ice edges intersect. The four volumes are divided into four seasons: in the spring volume, the roots are eaten through the inscriptions, and the mycelium usurps the contract of life and death; in the summer volume, the cicadas are used to forge the instrument of light, and the rust is wrapped in the prisoner's carnival; in the autumn brewing volume, the frost blade cuts through the rotten leaves to prophesy, and the bronze scale weighs the rotten forgiveness; in the winter silence volume, the pottery wheel explodes the star ring, and the umbilical cord tightens the universe to regenerate. Language is like quenching pottery pieces, melting the fragments of the Book of Songs and the cold flames of post-modernity - the star chips are the relics of the ice coffin, the salt and frost are the bone residue of time, and the cracks are the birth canal of the mother's body. Philosophical notes pierce the lines of poetry, deconstructing eternity with violent paradoxes: "The defeat is the draft of the imperial edict" and "All the ice is the testament of the flame." The whole book is like a chaotic creation ceremony: the wheel of time crushes the clay embryo of civilization, and the heart track redraws the birthmark of all things in the blood and rust. As you turn every page, you can hear ice and fire negotiating in the bones, and spring is drawing blades from the scabbard of rotten leaves.
What Readers Think
Rating
Community(0)
Rating
Community(0)
