Beidao

The August Sleepwalker introduces to American readers the compelling and remarkable poetry of China's foremost modern poet. Bei Dao (Zhao Zhenkai). One of the most gifted and controversial writers to emerge from the massive upheavals of contemporary China. Bei Dao both reflects and criticizes the conflicts of the Cultural Revolution of the late '60s and '70s. A youthful Red Guard whose early disillusionment with the destructiveness of the times made him an outsider. Bei Dao joined with other underground poets attempting to create an alternative literature that challenged the received orthodoxies of Maoist China. The author now lives in exile. Book jacket.

The August Sleepwalker

"A magical, impressionistic autobiography by China's legendary poet, Bei Dao. In 2001, to visit his sick father, exiled poet Bei Dao returned to his homeland for the first time in over twenty years. He had been in exile since the Tianenmen Square uprising. The city of his birth, however, was totally unrecognizable. "I was a foreigner in my hometown," he writes: "my "city that once was has vanished." In this lyrical autobiography of growing up in Beijing--from the birth of the People's Republic, through the chaotic three years of the Great Leap Forward, and on into the Cultural Revolution--Bei Dao uses his extraordinary gifts as a poet and storyteller to create another map of the city, a beautiful memory palace of endless alleyways and corridors that mixes personal narrative and geography with the momentous history he lived through. At the center of the book is his family of five--and their everyday life together through famine and festival. City Gate, Open Up is told in an episodic, fluid style that moves back and forth through the poet's childhood, recreating the smells and sounds, the laughter and danger, of a boy's coming of age during a time of great change and upheaval"--

City gate, open up

Bei Dao

Poems 1991-1996

At the Sky's Edge

Pei-tao

[Bei Dao] was obliged to create a new poetic idiom that was simultaneously a protective camouflage and an appropriate vehicle for 'unreality.' --Jonathan Spence, The New York Times Book Review. [A Bei Dao poem] feels as if it follows the pulse of consciousness, as it moves from metaphor to metaphor, thought to thought, something like a pilot light turned down to the jets and flickers of a single, intense, blue flame. --Robert Hass, Washington Post Book World.

Poems

Unlock

Twenty essays about Bei Dao's life in exile since Tiananmen Square."Knowledge of death is the only key that can open midnight's gate."Bei Dao Bei Dao has gained international acclaim over the last decade for his haunting interior poetic landscapes; his poetry is translated and published in some twenty-five languages around the world. Now, in Midnight's Gate, Bei Dao redefines the essay form with the same elliptical precision of his poetry, but with an openness and humor that complements the complexity of his poems. The twenty essays of Midnight's Gate form a travelogue of a poet who has lived in some seven countries since his exile from China in 1989. The work carries us from Palestine to Sacramento. At one point we are led into a basement in Paris for a production of Gorky's Lower Depths, the next moment we are in the mountains of China where Bei Dao worked for eleven years as a concrete mixer and ironworker. The subjective experience deepens and multiplies in these essays, filled with the stories of ordinary Chinese immigrants, as well as those of literary, artistic, and political figures. And it all coheres with a poet's observations, meditations, and memories.

Midnight's Gate

Jervey Tervalon's novel about young people in South Central Los Angeles grows out of his experience teaching in a high school there and his pain at the death of one of his favorite students.

The New Chinese Poetry : Poems by Bei Dao ... [et Al.]

Out of the Howling Storm

1!4I!;yB

An intimate look into the poetic mind of one of world poetry's most respected names.

Beidao

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