Among the most gifted and controversial writers to emerge from the massive upheavals in modern China, Bei Dao both reflects and criticizes the conflicts of the Cultural Revolution of the late sixties and seventies.

Most of the poems in Bei Dao's new collection Old Snow were written while the author was aboard. After obtaining a passport in 1985, he was finally able to accept the many invitations he had received to take part in poetry reading in Europe and America over the next few years, often accompanied by his wife, the painter Shao Fei, and their daughter, Tiantian.

An exile in the West since the events of Tiananmen Square, Bei Dao is widely considered China's most distinguished poet. In this new collection, he goes beyond the poetry of exile and reaches a new level of maturity and synthesis in a series of kaleidoscopic images of the end of the twentieth century. These poems, a conflation of history and personal happenstance, are explorations of individual, emotional, physical, and cultural distance that speak to an international readership in an ever more divided world. Bei Dao's poems are translated with new sharpness and intensity by David Hinton,...

Bei Dao, the internationally acclaimed Chinese poet, has been the poetic conscience of the dissident movements in his country for over twenty years. He has been in exile since the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989.

Unlock presents forty-nine new poems written in the United States, and may well be Bei Dao's most powerful work to date. Complex, full of startling and sometimes surreal imagery, sudden transitions, and oblique political references, and often embedding bits of bureaucratic speech and unexpected slang, his poetry has been compared to that of Paul Celan and Cesar Vallejo: poets who...

In his first retrospective volume of poetry in English, two of Bei Dao's previous books -- Forms of Distance (1994) and Landscape Over Zero (1996) -- are gathered together in one bilingual paperbook edition. At The Sky's Edge: Poems 1991-1996 marks a pivotal point in the poet's oeuvre, presenting the increasingly lyrical, meditative poems written in the years following his banishment from China in 1989. Translated into twenty-five languages, Bei Dao's work has long been appreciated internationally, but is just recently gaining a larger audience in the U.S. At The Sky's Edge becomes Bei Dao's...

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...

A second bilingual collection since the author's enforced exile from China in 1989.

In this lyrical autobiography of growing up from the birth of the People s Republic, through the chaotic 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 Beijing, a beautiful memory palace of endless alleyways and corridors, where personal narrative mixes with the momentous history he lived through. At the center of the book are his parents and siblings, and their everyday life together through famine and festival.Open Up, City Gate is told in an episodic, fluid style that moves back and forth...