China's Emily Dickinson takes the online reading public by storm with her insights and sincerity, and also with her handicap and literary genius, writes Raymond Zhou.

It is an understatement to say Chinese poetry is not in its golden age. The few poets who caught public attention in the past decade are seen as jokes by most - for the sheer lack of poetic sense.

The new year, however, has given rise to a new poet some call "China's Emily Dickinson". She first stood out for her cerebral palsy, and then even critics joined the chorus of praise. "As someone who suffers from this handicap and cannot work as others do, she possesses a gift for the language that others do not. The love without abandon and the hurt piercing the heart have endowed her language with gravitas and power just like grains that are ripe," effused an editorial in China's most eminent magazine for poetry, titled Shi Kan (Poetry Periodical).

That was last September, and its publishing did not gain wide dissemination until it got onto social media. By that time, the new discovery in Chinese poetry, Yu Xiuhua, had been writing for 16 years.

Yu suffered a difficult birth when she was born in 1976 on a Hubei farm. Because she depends on her parents for daily upkeep, she did not go on with her education after graduating from high school. While in high school, her teacher had already noticed her unusual talent in writing.

At the age of 19, her parents married her off to someone she was not in love with. This experience left her with painful memories - and a son who is now in college. In 2012, she traveled to another province to search for a job. Because she was slow with work, not only did she fail to make money but she could not even recoup her traveling expenses.

Yu reads and writes poems in the same way that her fellow villagers play mahjong. She takes on some light jobs, such as shushing away chickens from the barn floor, but she invariably turns inward, as is shown in this poem: "After the birds and chickens left, the sky's blue shortened/In this village deep inside central Hubei/The sky forces us to gaze at its blue/As our ancestors force us to gaze at our innermost narrow void/Forces us to enter September's abundance/We are comforted by our smallness, and hurt by it/Such living sets one at ease."

While she has accepted her physical limitations, she does endure physical pain, which is entwined with mental agony. In I Please This World With My Pain, she writes: "When I notice my body, it has gotten old and beyond recovery/Many parts ache in turns: the kidneys, the arms, the legs, the fingers/I suspect I have done evil in this world/I have spoken ill of blooming flowers. I suspect I have fallen for the night/And ignored the morning/Fortunately some pains can be omitted, deserted/And collected by loneliness and longtime desolation/These I'm ashamed to mention: I have not been/Good enough to them."

In the eyes of her neighbors, Yu has a bad temper, which she attributes to her discomfort in her living environment. She is not understood by her family or her fellow villagers and those who get to know her online would leave once they see her in person. Gradually she starts to use a form of brutal honesty as a defense mechanism.

Maybe because she did not have an audience - until recent weeks, that is - she vents her frustrations, including sexual ones, in her lines. The poem that startled many is the one titled Cross Half of China to Sleep You, which is her fantasy of online dating, using "sleep" as an ungrammatical verb for fly-by-night sexual relations. "Actually it's not that different I sleep you or you sleep me, but just/Two bodies clash with a ferocity that opens up a flower/Which simulates a spring that misleads us about the reopening of life."

Like Emily Dickinson, the American recluse who scribbled a large body of poems and never published them, Yu writes for herself, baring her soul and employing the language in ingeniously idiosyncratic ways. She describes her father whose "gray hair dare not grow out of his scalp" partly because he looks younger for his age and partly because he has the responsibility to take care of her. (She got only 60 yuan, or $9.60, a month from a government subsidy for the disabled - before royalties started trickling in lately.)

With her sudden fame, press and local officials have trekked to her door, showering her with attention. Her first collection of poems will be published in February. Some netizens express hope that Yu will not lose herself in this maelstrom of publicity. More significantly, the part of her she had so far covered up, willy-nilly, will be revealed to a large readership. Lines like "How much worldly dust can cover up a woman/And her emotions that are bloody yet still shining" could be an irony once she is lured into the writing establishment.

Yu Xiuhua has, for her adult life, used poetry writing as "a crutch that someone walking unsteadily would use in a wavering crowd". But in the eyes of her adoring readers, it provides the wings for her soul to fly.

Contact the writer at raymondzhou@chinadaily.com.cn

Diary: I exist only in this

Frogs' songs swell up, yet have my shoes any happiness left of cracking This is the happiness of the taste of a boorish farm woman's freshly harvested wheat and honeysuckle flowers And the taste of sunshine on the pajamas It has been so long since someone knocked onmy door, the path is strewn with withering petals I tumble down this world, and as quietly I'll hide amid a thousand things But sorrow is always so precious: You confirmmy existence So that you'd give me grace, compassion, love, hate and departures Right now, evening primroses trespass the window sill with their fragrance Insects chant high and low. How many people have I met In this world without companions I'm so fecund, heavier than a field of wheat But I lower my head And accept the moonshine over me.

(China Daily USA 01/28/2015 page9)