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In the 1994 book, A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form By Contemporary Women, the author had this to say about the series of sonnets from which the following is taken: "The poe(m)...(is) part of a sonnet sequence tracing the rise and fall of the last Empress of China. Tz'u-Hsi entered the Imperial Palance as a fifth-place concubine. When she birthed a son, she rose quickly through the ranks to become Empress at the age of twenty-six. Her last act was to appoint a two-year-old to her throne, and the imperial system collapsed shortly after in 1912...But why sonnets?...Because one theme of the series is duality: heart and mind, ambition and passivity, nurture and destruction. I imagined a woman forced to balance in herself many opposing forces."
"The Empress Receives the Head of a Taiping Rebel"
This is the right gift for a poet who enjoys ordering the sound of water, who rises late and draws tight blinds against the advancing sun. She uncovers the wooden box, her mouth for one second gasping, resembling his. Oh, how much his expression contains! The abandon, the sureness, the moment he stumbled and the sword spread his throat wide open. To have it all here, written down! Frozen possibility, like a fruit that ripens only once in a thousand years. She caught him in the act of ripening, and tonight, like a fruit, he’ll hang on a tree, whispering to her of longevity.
—Sarah Gorham
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