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The poetry collection "Edge of the Island" selects Chen Li's representative poems from various stages, which shows his diverse, rich, constantly changing and innovative creative outlook. His works combine local and avant-garde, Western and Eastern poetic forms, ranging from deep lyricism, topography writing to historical research, from simplicity to magical realism, from one-line poems and image poems to couplets and hundreds of lines of narrative poems. The range of his language sense is wide, spanning classical and vernacular, classical and modern, lyrical and realistic, rich and restrained, gorgeous and vulgar. This selection of poems demonstrates the poet's vigorous experimental spirit and absorbing ability - his efforts to develop various possibilities of Chinese characters. He is known as one of the most hybrid poets in modern Chinese poetry.

Sir, would you like to hear my story? Sir, please believe that I am a person, not a ghost. And, sir, please believe me, I am a sane person, I am not a madman - I am a sane person, although I may be mentally ill. Sir, would you like to hear my story? I am a foreigner. Yes, people here have a strong accent when they speak, and I also have an accent when I speak. You can tell that I am a foreigner by listening to my accent. I won't tell you where I come from because it's not necessary. This has nothing to do with the story I'm telling. I come from a very far away place. Where is that place? --Don't ask, I won't tell you. We all live on the same planet, it's enough to know that. My career? Ah, I don't have a career. I'm talking about now, now I don't have a career.

Strong wind. The temperature plummeted. Winter is really coming. The sky is gray. The trees are gray. The house is gray. People are also gray. You should take a shower in this weather. But the school bathhouse is closed today. It won't be open tomorrow either. As for the day after tomorrow, the day after tomorrow will not be open either. Bathing will have to wait until next Tuesday. Yao Xia felt uncomfortable all over. People who know Yao Xia say that he has mysophobia. The room where a man lives is so clean. In fact, only Yao Xia himself knows how much dust there is in those corners. Yao Xia felt that she was the dirtiest person. Living in gray all day long, even taking a shower is of no use. It is difficult to regain that clean and refreshing feeling. There are always so many people in the bathhouse. When you take a shower, there are always two or three people waiting beside you, watching expressionlessly as you scrub your naked body under the tap.

That day the principal called Liu Jiahe to the office. The principal said to him: "Teacher Liu, you don't have to come to school tomorrow." Liu Jiahe didn't understand what the principal meant. He looked at the principal blankly. The principal was twenty years younger than him and was once a student of Liu Jiahe. He was very polite to Liu Jiahe. But from the day he became the principal, Liu Jiahe was a little afraid of him. Later, Liu Jiahe thought that he was actually a little afraid of the principal when he was still a student. Liu Jiahe said, "Principal Zhang, will the school have a holiday tomorrow?" The principal said, "Teacher Liu, don't call me principal, just call me Xiao Zhang." Every time Liu Jiahe called him principal, he would repeat this, "Teacher Liu, the school won't have a holiday tomorrow..." Liu Jiahe said, "Then how can I not come to school tomorrow? I have four classes tomorrow morning.

That afternoon, school ended early. I got home and there was no one at home. My mother is not at home, and my sister is not at home either. The door was open, but there was no one at home. There was no one in the hall, no one in the kitchen, no one in the room. I shouted loudly: "Mom, Mom!" No one answered me. There was no one at home, so I looked up at the portrait of Chairman Mao on the front wall. Chairman Mao looked at me very seriously. I felt scared in my heart. It was so quiet at home, so quiet that I was a little scared of people. I rushed out of the house and almost fell down at the gate. I ran to the vegetable garden, but I didn't find my mother there. My sister is not here either. My sister is still young, and she is always with her mother. Mom takes her sister with her wherever she goes. I rushed home from the vegetable garden again.

It was so strange to say that I knew no one would believe it. That was more than thirty years ago. I was very young at that time and lived with my wife in a house on the west end of the village. When we first moved here, the room was empty. The village chief (his surname is Qian, he is the only big fat man in the village, but even behind his back, the villagers rarely call him Fatty Qian, but always the village chief) told us that the house is empty anyway, you can live in it if you want. I never thought that such a good thing would happen to me, so I happily moved in with Meilan (my wife). The house was located on a hillside at the western end of the village. It was some distance away from the nearest homes in the village, so it seemed very deserted at night. We didn't think anything of it at first, because it was the first time that Meilan and I really had our own home.

In Chuanshan Village, Yu Xiaobao is an outsider. It is not accurate to say migrant households, because Yu Xiaobao is alone and does not have a home. No one knows how old Yu Xiaobao is. He looks only eighteen or nineteen years old. His skin is a bit dark and he smiles kindly, like a child. His hometown is in Jiangsu, and now that I think about it, it should be North Jiangsu. But in the hearts of us country people, there is no concept of "Southern Jiangsu" and "Northern Jiangsu". We always call Jiangsu people "Jiangsu Guys" and always associate "Jiangsu Guys" with beggars. In fact, we call all beggars "Jiangsu guys". The reason is inexplicable. There are probably a lot of beggars in a certain year, and the absolute majority of the beggars are from Jiangsu. Maybe there was a disaster somewhere in Jiangsu (most likely northern Jiangsu) that year, and they couldn't survive staying at home, so they went out in groups to beg.