BOOK:Reckless Spring, SUN Publications

Hồ Xuân Hương (1772-1822) is known as an iconoclast whose life and work challenged the conventions for both a woman and a poet of her day. Formally her poetry followed classical Chinese styles, but she preferred to write using Nôm, a unique and nearly extinct ideographic writing system in which Chinese characters were modified to represent spoken Vietnamese.

By Dimitris Lempesis

Printed in a special hand-bound limited edition of 25 copies Bill Sullivan’s “Reckless Spring” contains images and graphics that he created in response to 52 versions of 13 poems by the Vietnamese poet Hồ Xuân Hương. Beneath a seemingly tranquil surface of mountain passes, household duties, and traditional foods and games, her poems offer an unblinking critique of women’s place in society, mixed with the frankest eroticism. In more than 60 images that draw on Japanese shunga, Matisse, and Hollywood fan magazines of the ‘30s, Sullivan riffs on Hồ’s themes of femininity, feminism, sex and sexual politics. Sullivan uses a variety of drawing, painting and graphic styles to respond to Hồ’s verse in 4 forms of text – Nôm, modern Vietnamese as well as new renderings into English by John Towey and into French by Juliet Towey. The 13 poems of “Reckless Spring” are presented in chapters that function like songs on an music album with each chapter presenting a track of shifting text and image that works as a meditation on the structure and theme of Hồ’s original but distant source poem.