Earthly Burdens is Gu Gang'’s first collection of poetry with ISBN, meaning he has previously self-published two books of poetry without ISBN. A poet from grass-roots, Gu Gang has experimented with various styles over the last thirty years on his own. He has never belonged to the intellectual writing, nor the spoken language group. He has overcome shallow lyricism early on and found his individual voice with a dual feature of both contemporary and classical tones. He focuses on the metropolitan city where he lives but presents a wasteland like Shanghai. With the publication of this careful selection of poems over a 30 year span, his work has finally caught nationwide attention in China.