Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Sidetracks

Sidetracks

Dao, Bei
Yang, Jeffrey

Paperback

Literary CriticismGeneral Poetry

Publisher Price: $18.95

ISBN10: 081123844X
ISBN13: 9780811238441
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Published: May 14 2024
Pages: 176
Weight: 0.42
Height: 0.48 Width: 5.33 Depth: 7.98
Language: English

A TIME MUST-READ BOOK OF 2024

A 2024 NPR BOOK WE LOVE

A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2024

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2025 GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE

Sidetracks, Bei Dao's first new collection in almost fifteen years, is also the poet's first long poem and his magnum opus--the artistic culmination of a lifetime devoted to the renewal and reinvention of language. As a poet, I am always lost, Bei Dao once said. Opening with a prologue of heavenly questions and followed by thirty-four cantos, Sidetracks travels forward and backward along the divergent paths of the poet's wandering life--from his time as a Young Pioneer in Beijing, through the years of exile living in six countries, back to the rural construction site where he worked during the Cultural Revolution, to the sunshine tablecloth in his kitchen in Davis, California, and his emotional visit home after a thirteen-year separation (the mother tongue has deepened my foreignness). All the various currents of our times rush into his lifelines, reconfigured through the vortex of experience and the poet's encounters with friends and strangers, artists and ghosts, as he moves from place to place, unable to return home. As the poet Michael Palmer has noted, Bei Dao's work, in its rapid transitions, abrupt juxtapositions, and frequent recurrence to open syntax evokes the un-speakability of the exile's condition. It is a poetry of explosive convergences, of submersions and unfixed boundaries, 'amid languages.'

Also from

Dao, Bei

View All

Also in

General Poetry

View All