Daughters of Emptiness

Beata Grant renders a great service by recovering and translating the enchanting verse — by turns assertive, observant, devout — of forty-eight nuns from sixteen centuries of imperial China. This selection of poems, along with brief biographical accounts that accompany them, affords readers a glimpse into the extraordinary diversity and sometimes startling richness of these women's lives. Daughters of Emptiness includes original hand-drawn calligraphies of each poet's name, as well as the poems in their original Chinese, alongside the translations.