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Wild Geese Returning: Chinese Reversible Poems
The genre of poems that may be read both forward and backward, producing different creations was known as the โ€flight of wild geeseโ€. These poems were often sent so that a distant lover, like the migrating birds, would return. Its greatest practitioner, and the focus of this critical anthology, is Su Hui, a women who, in the 4th century embroidered a silk for her distant husband using a grid of 840 characters that created perhaps 12,000 ways to read this poem. With examples from the 3rd to the 19th centuries, Michele Metail describes reversible poems as โ€a singular adventure at the edge of meaning, of language, and of writingโ€.