HENGDIAN, CHINA—The woman who has become one of China’s most-read poets — even hailed as its Emily Dickinson — spent most of her 41 years in a brick farmhouse tucked away behind trees and surrounded by wheat fields.

Most days she would limp down a dirt lane to a pond to feed the fish. She cut grass, grasping a sickle with hands that did not always obey her, to feed her rabbits. In the shade near the house she wrote at a low table, struggling to control her shaking body — a symptom of the cerebral palsy that she has lived with since she was born in this village in the central province of Hubei.

Then, in 2014, her life changed.

“Across China, everything is happening: volcanoes erupting, rivers running dry, prisoners and exiles are abandoned, elk and red-crowned cranes are under fire.

“I brave a hail of bullets to sleep with you. I compress countless dark nights into one dawn to sleep with you.”

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That year, Yu Xiuhua posted these lines from her poem “Crossing More Than Half of China to Sleep With You” on her blog and created a sensation. Her poems were discovered by Liu Nian, an editor at Poetry, a leading Chinese literary journal. Liu wrote about her and reprinted some of her works, and by February 2015 two volumes of her poetry had been published: In Such a Staggering World and Moonlight Drops on My Left Hand. The latter became the bestselling book of poetry in China in 30 years.

Swarms of journalists descended on her farmhouse, eager to see for themselves the disabled peasant woman who wrote of erotic longing with such startling vividness. She was appointed deputy chairwoman of the Federation of Literary and Art Circles in the nearby city of Zhongxiang. Liu invited Yu to a poetry reading at Renmin University of China in Beijing, where she was interviewed by People’s Daily, CCTV and other national news outlets.

Last year saw the release of a documentary about her, Still Tomorrow, by filmmaker Fan Jian, and the publication of another volume of poetry, We Forget That We Loved. This year she left China for the first time, appearing at Stanford University and other U.S. universities for film showings and seminars.

“I think Yu Xiuhua is China’s Emily Dickinson: extraordinary imagination and a striking power with language,” Shen Rui, a professor at Morehouse College in Atlanta specializing in Chinese literature and feminism, wrote in the preface to Moonlight Drops on My Left Hand.

For the record, Yu says she dislikes being compared with Dickinson, whom she has never read. In fact, her grounding in world literature is somewhat lacking, she said on a recent afternoon at her home in Hengdian.

Before she began writing poetry in her late 20s, she said, “I rarely read literature. I only started to read more famous works on my mobile phone after 2006. But I knew how to write before I read.”

“I like writing poems, because they’re simple and don’t have many words,” she said, speaking haltingly as her mouth twitched. “This suits me because I’m lazy.”

She now lives with her father in a newly built two-story house, a short walk from their old farmhouse. A recent village renovation razed most of the old buildings and moved residents into new housing, but her family home has been preserved as a tribute to a local celebrity.

She shrugs off the fame and the labels usually applied to her as a writer: female, peasant, disabled. She claims to be indifferent to readers’ reactions.

“Writing poems means facing myself, first and foremost, not facing others,” she said. “It’s to express myself. It’s other people’s business whether they respond to my poems. It has nothing to do with me.”

And they have responded. In her “Crossing More Than Half of China to Sleep With You,” she goes on to say:

“There is little difference between me sleeping with you, and you sleeping with me.

It’s no more than a collision of two bodies, composing a force under which the flowers blossom.”

The poem was widely discussed online, with some condemning it as lewd, while others praised it for channelling the feminist voice of a woman taking the initiative to “sleep with” others.

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Born in 1976 in Hengdian, Yu never finished high school. At 19 she married a construction worker 12 years older, in a wedding arranged by her parents, who were concerned that she would never be able to care for herself. At 27, she began writing poetry.

“I needed to do something to keep my spirit up,” she said. “Each day, I wrote one or two poems, and I felt I had accomplished something.”

Many of her writings centred on life in her village. In a poem about the wheat her father grew, she wrote: “Your happiness is the brown wheat hull, your pain the white wheat core.”

And often she writes about love and its turmoils. From her poem “I Am Not Alone”:

“I believe what he has with others is love. It’s only with me that it’s not.”

Fan, the filmmaker, said: “You can read in her poems that she has to suppress her desires. She longs for it, but she’s afraid. She’s never really experienced true love.”

Yu concedes her marriage was not successful. “I was too young and didn’t understand it,” she said. “I didn’t love him. He didn’t love me. Our characters weren’t at all compatible.”

For years, she wanted a divorce, but her husband refused. One factor, she said, was that her husband, who often lived far from home as a migrant worker, had nowhere else to return to.

Last year, after Yu received about $90,000 (U.S.) in royalties from her books, she bought a house for him, and the two divorced. Their son attends a university in Wuhan, Hebei’s capital.

“My mother wasn’t happy at first, but she was all right later, because she saw I was really happy,” Yu said. Not long afterward, her mother died of cancer.

Yu said of life after her divorce: “This is my best time. I feel great.” She is still scathingly self-critical, though.

“I’m really ugly,” she said, “so I can’t find a boyfriend.”

For the moment, she has her poems.

“What is poetry?” she wrote in an epilogue to Moonlight. “I don’t know and can’t tell. It’s when my heart roars, it emerges like a newborn. It’s like a crutch when one walks unsteadily in this unsteady world. Only when I write poetry do I feel complete, at peace and content.”

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