Hsia Yü

Hsia Yü is one of the most innovative and influential poets of the Chinese-speaking world, but she is also a highly respected avant-garde editor and artist-book designer. The poems represented in this issue of Plume are from her immensely popular fifth collection, Poems, Sixty of Them, which garnered the coveted Golden Butterfly Award for Book Design at the Taipei International Book Festival. What sold the jury was the unique design of the cover and inner flaps, which were completely varnished in scratch-and-read lottery card latex, under which were printed all the poems in the collection, a design feature that allowed each buyer to personalize his or own copy using the scratching technique called sgraffito.