Moving a Stone

A working-class poet in Hong Kong blends philosophy and everyday concerns as he observes local life, family, aging, labor, and contemporary politics.Yam Gong is a leading Hong Kong poet who has worked as a laborer since adolescence and produced many of his poems during his work breaks. An outsider poet, he explores the synthesis of everyday life and philosophical inquiry. Using shifting tonal registers, he refashions borrowed language, including English song lyrics, Cantonese wordplay, Chinese folk stories and poems, news reports, prayers, and slang. This bilingual volume is the first book-length collection of Yam Gong’s poems in English, drawing from his most important work over the past forty years. Moving a Stone: Selected Poems of Yam Gong is the fourth title in Zephyr’s Hong Kong Atlas series, the only series in the world to showcase Hong Kong poetry in English.