An explosion of verse

"Actually in my poems, sometimes the lines don't rhyme, but there is a basic tone. People who are familiar with those funeral songs might be able to tell the difference," he says.

In the 1990s, when he worked at the family's farm and herded cattle in mountains, he read extensively, including Karl Marx's Capital, and wrote a lot of "naive", "romantic" poems, he says.

That idyllic time ended when he got married in 1997 and his son was born in 1999.

"My wife and I tried our best to work, but although the food and vegetables growing on our own farm could feed the family, and we could make some money from selling the pigs we raised, there was no other income," he says.

At the turn of the millennium, Chen published his first two poems and got 40 yuan ($6.30), with which he bought several bags of milk powder for his son. But it happened only once. One evening, he got a message from a classmate saying that a mine needed a carman, so Chen packed his luggage, and started his career as a miner.

For 16 years, Chen traveled across the country to work in different mines, from both ends of the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region to Qinghai province and the Inner Mongolia autonomous region, and from Jiangxi to Guangdong provinces, witnessing many moments of danger and death, recording his observations, feelings and thoughts in poems.

Verses came to him while he was drilling holes in tunnel walls; sometimes he bent over the dynamite boxes writing poems to kill time; sometimes he would spontaneously record his feelings on scraps of paper and cigarette boxes.

In 2011, he arrived in a deserted area of Karamay, Xinjiang, to work in a mine, and slept in an underground room along with a "slagger"－someone who removes the waste material from the worksite－who would leave for work when Chen would get back from his shift underground.

The bunk bed was very thin. As a blaster, Chen placed empty dynamite boxes he brought back with him under the mattress. In this "no man's land", there was no paper available. To avoid boredom during his downtime, he would write poems on the boxes.

One year later, when he decided to leave and he packed his bedclothes, he found that his poems had covered all the boxes. However, the boxes were disposed of, so were the poems, like many of those he had written before.

In the following years, blogs became popular in China. Chen got a smartphone and registered a blog account, where he started to post his poems.