Time opens its enormous maw the moon on the machinerusting tired darkened turbid its inner dangergurgles past the cliff of the body collapses into mud and splintered stonesthe splinters of time turbulent waters fill a woman’s bodywild tidal waters no longer fluctuating with the season she sits at her stationthe flowing products and interlocking time are swallowed up quicklyaging ten years flowing past like water enormous wearinessfloats through the mind for many years she’s stuck bythe screws one screw two screws turning to the left to the rightfixing her dreams and her youth to some product lookat her pale youth running from an inland villageto a factory by the sea all the way to a shelf in Americafatigue and occupational diseases build up in the lungsget caught in the throat a lifetime of irregular periodsfierce coughing the distant development zone of factoriesthe clear-cut green lychee trees the machines by her sideshivering she rubs her swollen red eyes and sticks herself backinto the flow of products
Woman Worker: Youth Pinned to a Station
Feature Date
- June 9, 2025
Series
- Translation, What Sparks Poetry
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“Woman Worker,” by Zheng Xiaoqiong, translated by Eleanor Goodman, from In the Roar of the Machine, copyright © 2025 by Zheng Xiaoqiong, translation copyright © 2025 by Eleanor Goodman.
First published by Giramondo Publishing in July 2022.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Zheng Xiaoqiong was born in Nanchong, Sichuan, and moved south to Guangdong at the age of twenty-one to work in the factories. Her poetry has been published in venues such as People’s Literature, Poetry Magazine, Independence, and Piston. She has published several collections of poetry to great acclaim. Her work has been translated into a dozen different languages and received many awards, including the prestigious Liqun People’s Literature Award. Her poetry has been frequently set to music and dramatized, with performances in the United States, Germany, and elsewhere.
Eleanor Goodman is the author of the poetry collections Nine Dragon Island (2016) and Lessons in Glass (forthcoming 2026). She is the translator of five books from Chinese, including Something Crosses My Mind: Selected Poems of Wang Xiaoni, which was the recipient of a 2013 PEN/Heim Translation Grant and winner of the 2015 Lucien Stryk Prize. Her translation of In the Roar of the Machines: Poems by Zheng Xiaoqiong has just been published by NYRB.
A gripping collection.... Zheng Xiaoqiong’s poetry offers a sharp counter to the quiet pastorals and metaphysical musings that have long dominated the landscape of Chinese poetry in translation. These poems demand to be felt in the body and dare readers not to turn away from the blood, toil, and disease therein.
—Jury comments for ALTA’s 2023 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize (shortlisted)
Characterized by stark oppositions, personifications, and broken phrases, her work is razor-sharp in its observations…Her poems reveal how pervasive industrialization ensures that humans become part of the machine: nameless, a number on an assembly line, without rights.
—Silvia Marijnissen
At one level her work depicts the painful vulnerability of migrant workers within the grist of factory life, but she does so within a kind of industrial pastoral where machines, fire, and, above all, iron convulse into a terrifying sublime.
—Jonathan Stalling
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