"What a wonderful story this is. It has all the elements of a fable and a detective story, yet it is authentic feminist history -- one more revelation of the brutal way certain otherwise noble societies treated women and one more proof that the proud, gifted individual could still rise above circumstances to leave a mark on the world's memory. He Shuangqing, our heroine, lived in the lower Yangzi Valley of China in the eighteenth century. Bound into a brutish marriage, she poured her heart's blood into poems written on leaves, in ink made of pollen, until her death at 22. These verses, sensitively translated, are a gift in themselves. But the book goes further. For Elsie Choy pursued a line of clues back to the long-lost notebooks of a scholar-contemporary of the poet, who preserved not only the poems but a fascinating view of their background, for our edification today." -- Eleanor Munro, art critic and writer