"Bloom, translator Lucas Klein’s second selection of the prominent contemporary poet Xi Chuan (b. 1963) sings and theorizes what it means to have a body and to write, to love books in a materialist culture, and to be Chinese in a wide range of global and historical contexts. Elliptic lyric seekers need not knock. These are garrulous rhapsodies and charismatic meditations…Klein’s propulsive translation gets at the poem’s focus on breath, rhythm, mantra as ways of capturing the reader in the poem; this flirtation and its strategies are the real subject of the poem. It’s a good gateway. The reader’s very body becomes part of the poem: we’re hooked in."
—Noah Warren, Astra Magazine

"The thrill of this collection arises from Chuan’s charismatic voice, vividly rendered by Klein, and the unexpected turns from the intellectual to the sensual, from the absurd to the dead-serious."
― Heather Green, Poetry

"Xi Chuan’s new poems, in Lucas Klein’s splendid translations, reveal an important body of work American readers should know."
—Arthur Sze

"Xi Chuan doesn’t just ‘let a hundred flowers bloom’: even three thousand isn’t enough, ‘bloom one hundred eight thousand times!’ Within this abundance, he shuttles between East and West, lets his thoughts roam from the time of the Warring States to Disney, from ‘the joy of stinky feet’ to ‘Cultural Revolution armbands.’ With delightful wit and irony. What remains unstated is the possible cost of such blooming in China. But it is there as an undertone in the humor and gives the poems their extraordinary power."
—Rosmarie Waldrop