“Visual Cords” and “Dreaminations” poetry collections by Jianqing Zheng

Jianqing Zheng’s Visual Cords (Broken Tribe Press 2025) and Dreaminations (Madville Publishing 2026) capture discrete moments in time with seamless beauty and often echo imagistic poetry with Zheng’s striking use of images and precise, concrete language. The poet, who spent his first thirty-some years in China and the last thirty-plus years in Mississippi, displays considerable control and talent within the many poems in both books. The evocative nature of his sensory-laden images as well as the underlying intelligence and philosophy make both collections stand out. There is something both graceful and profound in his words.

Dreaminations contains nearly eighty pages of poems written as haibun or tanka prose, a Japanese style of poetry Zheng discusses in more detail in the accompanying interview. In the acknowledgments in Dreaminations, Zheng explains:

The prose poems in this collection were written in the forms of haibun and tanka prose. They are linked forms. Prose and haiku or tanka are linked to complement each other through juxtaposition for a new sensibility, but they also stand independently with complete meanings of their own. They are also like short-shorts or nonfiction prose.

In the poem “Adjusting the Self” from Dreaminations, Zheng explains the power of a well-done haiku in one of his haibun, writing:

Although haiku is as short as a bird’s chirp, reading a fine haiku still requires a slowdown, a momentary stay, a snapshot in the mind’s eye to gain an aesthetic taste. Like driving in the Smoky Mountains, an overlook or a roadside waterfall offers a moment to stop and grab shots before you move to the next scenic view. In a sense, haiku writing and reading, like a plate of fresh fruit salad, delights the mind.

Visual Cords is a collection of a similar number of poems as in Dreaminations, written as ekphrastic poems. Many of the pieces respond to photographs taken by Dorothea Lange during the Great Depression as well as to works by William Ferris, Leo Touchet, and other contemporary photographers. While there are some haibun among these poems, most are free verse.

As ekphrastic poetry by its nature responds to visual art, these poems are particularly strong in imagery. Yet, as with the best of ekphrastic poems, these works in Visual Cords are more than simply verbal depictions of the art at issue. For example, in “Mother and Children,” Zheng poignantly conveys the scene in what might well be Lange’s most famous photo titled “Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, March 1936.” Zheng writes: “Her right hand holds her wrinkled face / as if holding the heavy weight of concerns.” The poem concludes with the apt observation that “migration isn’t resurrection when they / crowd under a shabby tent, …trying to find a way.”

Not only does Zheng reward his readers with vivid visual imagery, but he also conveys other sensory elements in such a way to bring readers into the life and mood of the underlying photograph. In the poem “Delta Heat,” Zheng responds to a photograph by Ferris called “Unidentified rider and pony.” In this poem, we hear the “hooves clatter,” we see the “face glittered with sweat,” and we sense the street that “sizzles under the summer sun.” And in the opening poem, “Lunchtime,” responding to a photograph by Lange of a field worker at break, Zheng captures thirst and fatigue.

After hoeing the cotton field

the whole morning

the girl slumps on the pallet

in a sliver of shade

to gulp a bottle of soda.

One striking example of haibun in Visual Cords is the poem “Escape,” which responds to another powerful photograph of Lange of a migrant family seemingly at the end of their options, “Homeless Family, Atoka County, Oklahoma, 16 June 1938.” In the narrative part of the haibun, Zheng observes: “They plod along from place to place looking for a  meager chance of survival.” In the haiku portion of the poem, the homeless family are found “sharing the night / with stars.”

While many of these poems in Visual Cords are pensive and poignant (as are the Lange photographs behind the verses), the collection as a whole is harmonious, reflective, and shimmers with carefully crafted beauty. And the poems are not without moments of magic, as in the poem “Fireflies at Dusk,” in which a grey-haired man fishing stops to watch a boy catching fireflies and then “flings his hand / as if to catch a glow of childhood.”

In Dreaminations, the poems range far afield in their topics but, as with Visual Cords, are replete with striking images and they, too, have more than a little magic. In “Moonplay,” for instance, a “man plops into water to startle the moon into a fluttering bird.” And in “Touch,” a man’s “son dims into a silhouette surrounded by fireflies sparkling like stars.”

The haibun form in this collection allows for the clarity of narrative prose enhanced by the eloquence of fine poetry and the sharp precision of haiku and tanka. Indeed, Zheng’s works in Dreaminations radiate with eloquence and precision—and a seamless beauty. The works are also often deeply philosophical and sometimes intimate. In “Goodbye,” for example, Zheng flawlessly combines both the philosophical and the intimate in a reflective work quoting Chinese Tang Dynasty poet Li Po in the prose. While Zheng notes he did not feel sad leaving his Chinese village, yet he observes: “It was a cold morning that even roosters wouldn’t crow and dogs wouldn’t bark.” He concludes the haibun with great impact with the following haiku:

looking back

my muddy footprints

run toward me

There is a quest for finding home in many of these poems, and Zheng addresses this directly in a poem in Dreaminations titled “A Sense of Place.” This piece begins with something more essay than poem, quoting such diverse voices as Yeats and Mississippi writers Willie Morris and Richard Wright on the nature of home and “the deep heart’s core.” Zheng writes “My homeplace is a metropolitan city divided into three parts by the Yangtze and the Han rivers. Now I live by the Mississippi River. To me, water connects places and memories on both sides of the Pacific.”

Jianquing Zheng

In addition to Visual Cords and Dreaminations, Jianqing Zheng is the author of The Dog Years of Reeducation, A Way of Looking, and five poetry chapbooks and e-chapbooks. He is also editor of seven scholarly books and coeditor of four scholarly books. He received the 2019 Gerald Cable Book Prize, 2001 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Award, and three poetry fellowships from the Mississippi Arts Commission, among other awards and honors. He is professor of English at Mississippi Valley State University, where he serves as editor of the Journal of Ethnic American Literature and Valley Voices. His poems have appeared in numerous literary journals including Birmingham Poetry Review, Mississippi Review, and Poetry South.