New image poetry by Taiwanese female poet Hsia Yu

―A visual experience beyond words―

Abstract

　Taiwanese female poet Hsia Yu is one of the most experimental and hard-to-category poets in Taiwan's contemporary poetry circles. Since her first collection of poems Memorandum (1984), she has been constantly challenging the possibility of poetry. Each collection of poems shows amazing originality, together with playing with language and subverting character, and has always been regarded as a representative poet of postmodernism and feminism. Taiwan's poetic circles have accumulated rich research on Hsia Yu. This article intends to develop a new research perspective and analyze the strong cross-border visual experience aesthetics of Hsia Yu's recent works (2010-2020). That Zebra(2010), First Person (2016), and Axis of Spine (2020). In addition to an in-depth discussion of the visual exploration of the language of Hsia Yu's poetry, this article is hoped that it can complement the contemporary appearance of the aesthetic tradition of "picture poetry" in Taiwan's modern poetry. In the past, image poetry experiments mainly focused on changing text combinations and layout methods. In the contemporary era, Hsia Yu, a female poet who has never "Followed the rules", allows poetry to go beyond text and images and explore more diverse visual experiences.