We are thrilled to announce that VESSELS, an exquisitely beautiful poetry collection by Chinese poet Ningli Deng, is forthcoming from Wind&Bones Books in 2027.
Intense and textured, Ningli Deng’s poems explore some of the largest of questions through the smallest of details — a jar of greengages, a cup, scaled fish, the spiny shell of jackfruit sliced open to reveal the muscular flesh beneath. This first book-length collection of Deng’s poems in English is published in a bilingual Simplified Mandarin / English edition. Here’s a sample.
Ningli Deng is a poet, novelist, and translator based in Zhuhai, China. She is the translator of Jane Hirshfield’s Nine Gates: Entering The Mind of Poetry and the edited collection, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales (Penguin Books). Her work has appeared in Shanghai Culture, West Lake, and Sinan Literary Selection, among other literary journals.
We met Ningli back in 2023 when we ran a project called Dragon Carving for Writers. It was a British Council-funded project exploring cross-cultural creativity in the UK, Hong Kong, China and beyond.
During the project we explored Liu Xie’s medieval Chinese classic the Wenxin diaolong (文心雕龍), or The Heart of Literature, the Carving of Dragons.
Liu’s book is a masterpiece of literary theory; but it is also more than this. It is an insightful and incisive philosophy of creativity. At Wind&Bones, we take our name from the chapter in the Wenxin diaolong on “wind and bones” (風骨).
As part of the project we commissioned six new works of literature, to be translated and published in both English and Chinese. It was then that we fell hopelessly in love with Ningli’s poetry.
We’re so excited to have this collection out in the world and we’re sure that you’ll love it just as much as we do! The poems are translated into English by Will Buckingham.
Pre-orders for VESSELS will be opening soon so stay tuned.
