In translating Ye Hui’s poems from the Chinese in the collection The Ruins (Phoneme Media, November 2025), Dong Li wanted to foreground a writer he says is an “underdog” in contemporary Chinese poetry. “I wanted to highlight a quiet, Pessoa-like local poet,” says Li. Ye, who lives in the Chinese countryside and clerks at a taxation bureau, writes poems that transform familiar objects—faces, rain, fireflies, trains—into sites of metaphysical inquiry. By juxtaposing striking and clear images, Ye draws a world untethered to linear time, one that hovers on the borders of the mundane and the uncanny, the known and the strange, the foretold and the happening. “Let the train take us,” Ye writes, “Through the thin dusk, to cross // The end and then the inborn wildness / Then the real absence of light.”
Dong Li translated Ye Hui’s poems from the Chinese in the collection The Ruins (Phoneme Media, November 2025).
When he has a new translation project, Li—who translates from Chinese, English, French, and German—says the first place he usually sends pieces to is Asymptote, an online journal of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, drama, and criticism. The editors selected for publication a group of Ye’s poems that Li says “seem to have a great affinity for what Asymptote promotes: the quiet brilliance and the resolute commitment to the necessary in literary arts and to dialogues across all borders.” Asymptote, which publishes a quarterly issue and a regular blog, has released work in 116 languages by writers from 130 countries. (The editors also commission translations into languages other than English.) Li notes that Asymptote, which launched fourteen years ago, has “set the standard” for publishing bilingually and including translators’ notes and audio recordings. Submissions in all genres are open year-round via Submittable with a $10 fee; the editors note that the fee keeps the magazine’s content free during a time of dwindling financial support from institutions and readers alike.
Li singles out another periodical of international literature, Circumference, as devoted to innovation. The print biannual features translations of poetry, essays, and drama by mostly contemporary authors, with a particular interest in authors whose work has not yet been published in English. “The editors are picky and generous,” Li says. “They selected three very different poems that shed light on how various and capacious a metaphysical poet like Ye Hui can be.” Stefania Heim, Jennifer Kronovet, and Dan Visel founded Circumference in 2002 and now run the magazine’s partner press, Circumference Books. The magazine, which is now edited by writer and translator Elina Alter, is open to submissions for online publication via e-mail.
While Li was not familiar with Copihue Poetry when its editor solicited work from him, he was drawn to the journal’s vision and immediately submitted a batch of translations. Founded in 2022 by immigrants in Chile, the online publication features original English and Spanish poems along with English translations of poems from other languages. “I appreciate their focus on underappreciated and marginalized literary citizens,” says Li, whose translations appeared in Copihue Poetry’s second issue, which also spotlighted translations from French, Korean, Odia, Romanian, and Spanish. Submissions are open year-round via e-mail.
Li describes Ye as pursuing a “poetic quest for the contemporaneousness of all things,” which can be heard in the book’s title poem, when the speaker says: “Are these the ruins / Or an unfinished castle / Perhaps I have arrived too early.” Li placed this piece, along with another translation, in the Cincinnati Review, a print biannual of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, drama, and criticism. The editors also publish miCRo, a weekly blog curated by graduate students at the University of Cincinnati that showcases poetry, flash fiction, micro essays, and short hybrid works. While miCRo is dedicated to short forms, Li, who also writes poetry, notes that the print journal has previously supported his own “long poems that are always hard to place,” including a twenty-page poem. Submissions to miCRo are currently open; submissions to the print journal open every December, May, and September until the review reaches its submissions cap.
When writer Vi Khi Nao asked Li to submit to the issue of 128 Lit that she was guest editing, Li was impressed by the project’s multilingual, internationalist approach and the editors’ meticulousness. Established in 2022, 128 Lit has published two print issues of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction; a translated story collection; an online project committed to anticoloniality; and more. In early 2026, the editors will release the first print edition of their (Re)Familiarize series, which gathers work that resists the “normalization of domination as a colonizing, structural, and socio-emotional weapon.” Submissions of individual pieces and manuscripts of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, hybrid work, art, and multimedia work are open to the (Re)Familiarize series until January 15, 2026.
Dana Isokawa is the editor in chief of the Margins and a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
