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On May 18, Sze will be in conversation with Wang Jiaxin, an eminent, prizewinning Chinese poet who lives in Beijing and New York, and whose works Sze, a second-generation Chinese American, has translated. Sze and Wang on stage together presents a rare opportunity to hear from two prolific poets (and friends) whose paths to the page span place and time, but whose loyalty to language is common ground. Both have dedicated their lives to the craft as writers, educators, translators, and true believers in the power of poetry to communicate cultural consciousness, bridge international divides, and illuminate the human spirit. Both are also justly praised for works of lyric grace and social and cultural relevance. “A meticulous craftsperson” is how Sze was described by the committee that just last week conveyed his most recent honor: a 2024 National Book Foundation’s Science + Literature Award. The judges included a poet, an astrophysicist, a biologist, a chemist, and a doctor—a testament to Sze’s ability to connect science, technology, and the humanities through poetic voice and form. The award was for his eleventh collection, The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems, described by the committee as “yoking the earth-bound and the heavenly, full of cosmic wonder.” Published in 2021, The Glass Constellation reveals Sze’s creative evolution through poems from ten previous collections, including his 2019 National Book Award–winning Sight Lines, and a selection of new works. Evoking imagery of the cosmos and the natural world, the book reflects the singular poetic style and transcendent vision for which Sze is renowned, one that fuses elements of Chinese, Japanese, Native American, and Western experimental traditions to explore juxtapositions of place, culture, and experience. While Sze’s next book, The Silk Dragon II: Translations of Chinese Poetry (forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press on April 16), guides readers though a one-and-a-half-millennia history of Chinese poetic tradition, Wang Jiaxin’s Darkening Mirror: New and Selected Poems has been hailed by former U.S. poet laureate Robert Hass as a book that “belongs to this moment.” A distinguished poet, essayist, and translator with more than forty books to his name, Wang is well known in China as both a writer and professor of literature at Beijing’s Renmin University. Darkening Mirror, his first full-length collection of poems in English, introduces him to the English-language world. Writing in the book’s foreword, Hass says that Wang stands out with “a voice stunningly alert and interior,” a reminder “that poetry is not a matter of movements and historical moments, but of individual voices.”
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