In translating Ye Hui’s poems from the Chinese in the collection The Ruins (Phoneme Media, November 2025), Dong Li wanted to foreground a writer he says is an “underdog” in contemporary Chinese poetry. “I wanted to highlight a quiet, Pessoa-like local poet,” says Li. Ye, who lives in the Chinese countryside and clerks at a taxation bureau, writes poems that transform familiar objects—faces, rain, fireflies, trains—into sites of metaphysical inquiry. By juxtaposing striking and clear images, Ye draws a world untethered to linear time, one that hovers on the borders of the mundane and the uncanny, the known and the strange, the foretold and the happening. “Let the train take us,” Ye writes, “Through the thin dusk, to cross // The end and then the inborn wildness / Then the real absence of light.” {read}