Assembly Line Sculpture

After reading these poems, you may never look at your cell phone in quite the same way again.
Xu Lizhi was a young poet working on an assembly line at a Foxconn factory in China, one of the largest manufacturers of Apple and other electronic devices. Unable to afford university and after multiple unsuccessful attempts to get a job elsewhere, he took his life at the age of 24. His haunting poems describe the suffering, dehumanization, and harsh conditions at such factories, conditions that our sleek shiny devices obscure. After his death, Xu Lizhi's story was picked up by major media around the world, including the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Die Zeit, and Time. Most of Xu Lizhi's poems have not been available in English — until now. This book is a searing indictment of globalization, capitalism, labor relations, and the dark underside of technology development and manufacturing.

Xu Lizhi was born in 1990 in the village of Jieyang, Guangdong. Unable to afford university, he took a job on an assembly line at a Foxconn factory complex in Shenzhen that employs some 100,000 people. He began writing poetry as an outlet for his feelings, and a number of his poems were published, often describing the harsh and dehumanizing conditions at the factory. Despite numerous attempts to find employment at libraries and literary outlets, he could not get hired, likely in part because he lacked a college degree. He died by suicide in 2014 at the age of 24, leaving behind some 200 poems. His friends published a small collection of his poems posthumously. Major news media reported on his death, including the Washington Post, Bloomberg News, and Time. The title for the anthology Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Migrant Worker Poetry, edited by Qin Xiaoyu, and translated by Eleanor Goodman, was taken from a poem by Xu Lizhi, and six of his poems are included in the collection (White Pine, 2016).

Eleanor Goodman is the author of two poetry collections, Nine Dragon Island, Lessons in Glass, and the translator of six books from Chinese, including most recently In the Roar of the Machine: Selected Poems of Zheng Xiaoqiong (NYRB, 2025). She is a Research Associate at the Harvard University Fairbank Center, as well as a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship. Her translation of Wang Xiaoni's Something Crosses My Mind (Zephyr Press, 2014), was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize and won the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize, and her translation of Roots of Wisdom: Selected Poetry by Zang Di (Zephyr Press, 2017), won the Patrick D. Hanan Prize from the Association for Asian Studies.