by Yen Ai Lin

Translated by Jenn Marie Nunes

Yen Ai-lin’s Bone Skin Flesh is a landmark collection in contemporary Taiwanese poetry, now brought into English with sharp tenderness and fidelity. First published in 1997, these poems confront and revel in the feminine—its sensualities, violences, desires, and contradictions—rendered in language that is both startlingly corporeal and lushly imagistic.

With imagery that drips, clogs, bursts, and blossoms, Yen’s work unsettles as much as it delights. The body here is not metaphor alone but fleshly and unrelenting: truth is a glob of spit, the sky a leaking breast, the moon a tongue pressed to skyscrapers. Across these visceral landscapes, women appear and reappear—mother, lover, crone—both mythic and ordinary, tender and grotesque.

Inflected with the spirit of punk and kin to the Gurlesque tradition, Yen’s poetry insists on the feminine as a site of rebellion, pleasure, melancholy, and creation. Her poems risk excess and revel in sensation, yet they are carried by an undercurrent of earnestness and reverence.

In Jenn Marie Nunes’s translations, these poems cross into English as both urgent and intimate, demanding that readers not simply read them but live with them. Bone, Skin, Flesh is poetry that grows in you, out of you, taking up space in ways that feel at once familiar and wholly unexpected.

About the Poet

Yen Ai-Lin is a Taiwanese poet whose work moves between modern poetry, lyrical prose, and cultural criticism. She was the first female poet in Taiwan to publish a sustained series of erotic poems—works that ignited wide discussions on gender and desire. Her writing, shaped by diverse influences, has been honored with the National Outstanding Young Poet Award, the Ministry of Culture’s Outstanding Award for New Poem Creation, the Genesis Poetry Magazine 35th Anniversary Poet Award, the inaugural Taipei Literature Award, the Wu Zhuoliu New Poetry Award, and more. Through her words, Yen has left a lasting imprint on readers, on public discourse, and on the study of contemporary literature.

About the Translator

Jenn Marie Nunes is the author of And/Or (2015), winner of the Switchback Books Queer Voices Award, and Those People, winner of the 2016 National Poetry Review Press Prize. She holds an MFA from Louisiana State University and a PhD in Chinese literature from The Ohio State University, specializing in modern poetry and film with a minor in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her work spans poetry, translation, and scholarship, with a focus on cross-cultural and feminist literary exchange.

ISBN: 978-1-913891-63-3
Publication date:  1 September 2025
Format: Paperback (Demy octavo) 216mm x 138mm
Language:  Bilingual edition in Chinese and English, with introduction in English
Pages:  156 pp