This book is a genre study and genre history of prose poetry in China that begins during the Hundred Flowers Movement (1956) with authors Ke Lan and Guo Feng, describes prose poets of the 1980s such as Liu Zaifu, and ends with contemporary artists Ouyang Jianghe and Xi Chuan. The book argues for the distinctiveness of contemporary prose poetry from the prose compositions of Lu Xun, Liu Bannong, and other artists from the Republican period; it instead finds prose poetry’s prehistory in Bing Xin’s translations of Tagore. Building on ideas from Derrida, Heidegger, and Celan, the book defines prose poetry as the result of a series of processes that include condensation, recitation, and refusal; it sees the composition of prose poetry as a simultaneous act of imitation and creation that intervenes in prose. The book covers official or orthodox literature, semi-orthodox literature, and the avant-garde; drawing on the work of Bourdieu, it argues that each is necessary to understand the literary field of the genre, even as they compete to silence each other. The book ends with a call to rethink adaptations and adoptions of the rhetoric of Chinese socialism.