In recent years, the poet and musician Yan Jun has been writing mainly diary poems and explications of aspects of contemporary China, along with allusions to classical subject matter. One feature of Yan Jun’s poetry is its vitality and rapid turnover of images, one following on rhythmically from the other. In ‘Charter Sonnet’, for instance, each line begins urgently with the repeated phrase “I demand”: “I demand that you and I be together, never to be separated; / I demand memories, black flowers, stars that shine above bicycles and turn into kids’ faces; / I demand the release of imprisoned words like ‘your mother’s cunt’ and ‘Jiang Zemin’.”