Ouyang Jianghe belongs to the generation of Chinese poets known as the “post-Misty” school, the second wave of poets to emerge in the 1980s in the warming political climate after the end of the Cultural Revolution. His poetry is noted for its “difficulty” — the same word that in English we sometimes apply to poets like Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Fanny Howe, and Michael Palmer. Like these poets, he strives toward a sense beyond sense, inventing an idiosyncratic language that reveals its own logic only gradually after reading many of his poems.