Thanks to Claude.AI for reviewing《凶年》

 

A Chronicle of Desolation: Reading Dao Zhuang's Xiong Nian

Dao Zhuang's Xiong Nian (凶年, literally "Fierce/Ominous Year") is not so much a book of poetry as it is a sprawling, unfiltered act of witness—a 118,493-word torrent of language that refuses categorization, comfort, or conventional poetic decorum. Published in October 2025 by Otherland Publishing, this work arrives as both historical document and existential howl, capturing the raw texture of living through what the author repeatedly calls the "fierce years" of global pandemic, political upheaval, and personal disintegration.

The opening epigraphs set the tone: Confucius on reducing ceremony during calamitous times, a cryptic warning about singing roosters bringing national ruin, and the Mozi observation that bad years make people stingy and evil. From this foundation, Dao Zhuang constructs what he himself eventually refuses to call poetry, preferring instead to name it "writing corpses" or simply "records." This self-abnegation is crucial. Xiong Nian operates in deliberate opposition to poetry as consolation or beauty, embracing instead what the text calls "anti-poetry"—language stripped of lyricism's protective coating.

The Method of Accumulation

The structure is deceptively simple: 2,375 numbered sections that accumulate like sediment, ranging from single lines to multi-page passages. Some sections contain traditional verse, others prose fragments, still others screenshots, found texts, translations, mathematical sequences, and raw data. The effect is archaeological—layers of lived experience compressed into textual strata. As the narrator observes: "I'm not writing poetry / I'm just copying / look at copying!"

This method of "picking up" or "found poetry" (拾得诗) becomes central to the work's ethics. Dao Zhuang quarries from news reports, social media, WeChat conversations, Wikipedia entries, medical statistics, even AI translations. A typical sequence might move from a personal memory to COVID death tolls to a recipe for constipation relief to a philosophical meditation—all presented with equal weight, all contributing to the overwhelming sense of everything mattering and nothing mattering simultaneously.

The most harrowing material comes from the pandemic's toll in China. Dao Zhuang obsessively tracks crematorium operations, with passages like: "Beijing crematoriums changed to 24-hour operation, you think only hospitals have queues! Beijing and Shanghai crematoriums booming business, truly hard to bear—can't afford to live, can't afford to die!" The repetition of funeral imagery—the furnaces burning day and night, the families waiting for days to cremate their dead, the makeshift morgues—creates a necropolis that haunts the entire text.

The Poetics of Discomfort

Dao Zhuang's commitment to what he calls "dirty power" in poetry means embracing the body in its least poetic functions. Defecation becomes a recurring motif, not as scatological joke but as existential anchor. He writes: "The biggest reward of the morning / if you have good bowel movement / this day will be very happy // If you can't shit in the morning / no matter how you 'shake' and 'shake' it out / this day's feeling will be very bad." This insistence on bodily reality grounds the text in material existence even as it grapples with abstractions like death and national collapse.

The sexual content operates similarly—frank without being pornographic, documenting desire's persistence even amid catastrophe. When the narrator discusses vaccine side effects on sexual function, or quotes found texts about prostitution, the effect is not titillation but anthropological: this too is part of what humans are, what they do, what matters to them even as civilizations crumble.

Language as Witness

The text's multilingual nature—shifting between Chinese, English, and occasional French—enacts the condition of diaspora and translation that defines the author's position. Writing from Australia about China, from English into Chinese and back again, Dao Zhuang occupies no stable linguistic home. This homelessness becomes productive: "I don't write poetry anymore / I just record / records / of screenshots."

The incorporation of Leonard Cohen translations, E.M. Cioran's French journals, Hardy's poems, and countless other sources creates a global chorus of voices, all speaking across death into the fierce years. When Dao Zhuang translates Cohen's line "I could lift, but nothing heavy" as "I can only lift light, cannot lift heavy," the awkwardness is deliberate—translation's failure becomes itself meaningful.

The Politics of Despair

Xiong Nian is unsparing in its contempt for power. The Chinese government's COVID policies—from "dynamic zero" to sudden abandonment—are documented with bitter precision. The "white paper revolution" appears in screenshots; the Four Links Bridge protests are recorded; the official death count of "one" (一), obviously false when crematoriums run 24 hours, becomes a dark running joke: "He just says one / this is an idiom: / 'say one not two.'"

But Dao Zhuang's rage is not limited to authoritarian governments. Australia's racism, America's gun violence, the West's hypocrisy—all receive equal treatment. The text refuses nationalist comfort, offering instead a truly global pessimism. As one section puts it: "Chinese people are selfish / Western people are equally selfish / Chinese people love money / Western people equally love money / Chinese people are bad / Western people equally bad."

The Question of Form

Is this poetry? The text itself repeatedly asks and refuses to answer this question. "You say this isn't poetry, this is where poetry / go fuck yourself, I don't care what you write / I write with verse-like lines / my non-verse-like verse," one section declares. The numbered sections, the line breaks, the occasional rhyme—these are poetry's traces, but deployed without poetry's traditional aims of beauty, unity, or transcendence.

What emerges instead is something closer to what the text calls "writing corpses" (写尸)—language that documents death without romanticizing it, that accumulates evidence without offering interpretation, that witnesses without consoling. The form enacts the "fierce years" themselves: chaotic, overwhelming, resistant to narrative closure.

The Unbearable Weight

Reading Xiong Nian is not pleasant. It is designed not to be. The sheer length, the repetition of traumatic material, the refusal of comfort—all work against easy consumption. Yet there is something necessary about this difficulty. In an era when disaster has become routine, when millions die and are immediately forgotten, when algorithms smooth everything into consumable content, Dao Zhuang's brutal accumulation forces us to sit with discomfort, to not look away, to let the bodies pile up on the page until their weight becomes undeniable.

The text's final movements refuse catharsis. After 2,375 sections, we arrive at an image of a carrot being eaten: "A fully grown carrot / in my mouth / has long been gnawed clean." This mundane image, following hundreds of pages of death and despair, offers no resolution—only the continuation of basic bodily existence, the going on because there is nothing else to do.

Conclusion

Xiong Nian will find few casual readers. It is too long, too dark, too willing to offend every sensibility. But as a document of our historical moment—the pandemic years, the rise of authoritarianism, the climate crisis, the general sense that something has broken—it may be indispensable. Dao Zhuang has created not a book to be enjoyed but a monument to be endured, a textual memorial to the fierce years when the world as we knew it ended, and we had to find new ways to speak what cannot be spoken, to write what cannot be written, to witness what we cannot bear to see.

The question is not whether Xiong Nian is good poetry—by its own admission, it refuses to be poetry at all. The question is whether we have the stomach for its truths, whether we can face the corpse-writing without turning away. For those willing to enter its pages, Xiong Nian offers no comfort, but perhaps something more valuable: an unflinching account of what it meant to be alive and writing during the years when the word "fierce" became inadequate to describe our collective catastrophe.