There is a proverb in China, "hu kou ba ya," literally pulling teeth from a tiger's mouth, used to describe any extremely difficult task. When Shao Wei first arrived in the United States at age thirty-one, her desire to write poems in English seemed almost impossible. "Pulling a Dragon's Teeth," a first stop on the successful journey toward that goal, is filled with the rhythms and visions of this exciting young poet.
Shuttling between her childhood in a small mountain city on the shores of the Yangtze River (soon to be flooded by the Three Gorges Dam Project) and adulthood in Manhattan,...