Suoyin, the title of this collection, consists of two characters: suo, to search, and yin, to hide or be hidden. The word suoyin first appears in the I Ching, where it denotes the search for obscure or hidden things; but it is also the word for a concordance to an ancient text, usually with extensive commentary – such as the Tang dynasty historian Shima Zhen’s masterful suoyin on Shima Qian’s classic text ‘Records of the Grand Historian’.
Chen explains in the preface to Suoyin that she has borrowed the word to describe the poet’s search for metaphor (the Chinese word for metaphor, yinyu, contains the character yin, because metaphors are taken as a sort of hidden simile). Each of the poems in her collection is headed either suo (to search) or yin (metaphor). But the collection also doubles as a commentary on an ancient text, since Chen’s own poems are interspersed with her translations of fragments of Sappho.