City Gate, Open Up is the lyrical autobiography of China’s legendary poet Bei Dao. Exiled from Beijing in the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, Bei Dao returned to his homeland in 2001 for the first time in over twenty years. The city of his youth had vanished: ‘I was a foreigner in my hometown, ‘ he writes. The shock of this experience released a flood of memories and emotions contained in City Gate, Open Up. The poet recalls the Beijing of his youth, from the birth of the People’s Republic, through the chaotic years of the Great Leap Forward, and on into the Cultural Revolution. At the centre of the book are his parents and siblings and their everyday life together through famine and festival. Bei Dao’s autobiography is a memory palace of endless alleyways and corridors, where personal narrative mixes with the momentous history he lived through. ‘One of the great poets of our time.’ Michael Hofmann. ‘Intense, elegant and impressionistic.’ Dwight Garner
Circa l’autore
Jeffrey Yang is the author of the poetry collections Vanishing-Line (2011) and An Aquarium (2008), winner of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award. He is the Translated by of Ahmatjan Osman’s Uyghurland, the Farthest Exile (with the author), Liu Xiaobo’s June Fourth Elegies, Su Shi’s East Slope, and Bei Dao’s autobiography City Gate, Open Up. He is also the editor of the anthologies Birds, Beasts, and Seas: Nature Poems (2011) and Time of Grief: Mourning Poems (2013), and the collection The Sea Is a Continual Miracle: Sea Poems and Other Writings by Walt Whitman (forthcoming, 2017). Yang works as an editor at New Directions Publishing and New York Review Books.
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