Oracle Bones: Poems from the Time of Misrule - Softcover

Holyoak, Keith

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798995488903

Publisher: BookBaby, 2026

Synopsis

A tyrant king. A shaman's warning carved in bone. A poet who has spent a career studying how the mind makes meaning, turning that same eye on the present moment.

Oracle Bones: Poems from the Time of Misrule is a work of political satire poetry unlike anything else being written today: a sequence of pseudo-translations, in the tradition of Borges and Nabokov, presenting themselves as classical Chinese poems that never existed, ancient oracle bone inscriptions "translated" into short, cutting verse for contemporary American poetry readers.

Thousands of years ago, a shaman queried the gods by carving a question into bone and applying heat until it cracked; the pattern of the cracks became the answer. Holyoak revives that ancient form of divination poetry to deliver warnings to a foolish and dissolute king, warnings that land, unmistakably, on the state of American politics today: a divided people, brutalized migrants, unchecked greed, a king lost in debauchery while loyal counsel goes ignored and rebellion stirs.

Of course, this primitive form of misrule vanished from the earth long ago. Nothing like it could happen in a modern democracy, unless political satire has quietly been overtaken by political fact.

This expanded second edition opens with a new preamble, "The Poet and the Tyrant," and comes from a writer uniquely positioned to write it: Keith Holyoak is both a cognitive scientist who has spent his career studying how the mind builds meaning through metaphor and analogy, and a poet and translator of classical Chinese poetry who has lived that same question from the inside. A Distinguished Professor of Psychology at UCLA and a Guggenheim Fellow, he brings both disciplines together on the page, an ancient form made new, in service of a warning for right now.

If you're drawn to political satire, classical Chinese poetry in translation, or literary pseudo-translation in the spirit of Borges and Nabokov, this is the collection you've been waiting for, praised on release as a strikingly original use of an ancient form. Each crack in the bone yields a new answer; this sequence rewards a second and third reading.

About this title

About the Author

Keith Holyoak is a cognitive scientist, poet, and translator of classical Chinese poetry. He is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at UCLA, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Guggenheim Fellow. His most recent book, The Human Edge (MIT Press, 2025), explores how the mind creates meaning through analogy, the same question that drew him to the oracle bone itself, an instrument through which ancient diviners once read meaning into cracked patterns.

He is also the translator of Facing the Moon: Poems of Li Bai and Du Fu, part of a decades-long engagement with classical Chinese poetry alongside his scientific work. Holyoak grew up on a dairy farm in British Columbia, earned his B.A. from the University of British Columbia and Ph.D. from Stanford, and taught at the University of Michigan before joining UCLA.

Edition details

• Publisher: BookBaby
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798995488903
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 44