Recently elected an honorary member of the A merican Academy of Arts and Letters, Bei Dao is China''s pre- eminent contemporary poet. The poems in this collection refl ect the fractured existence he has led since his exile from China in 1989 '

Author Biography

Bei Dao was born in 1949, and was first nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1993. His other collections in English and published by Anvil are 'The August Sleepwalker' (1988), 'Old Snow' (1992) and 'Forms of Distance' (1994).David Hinton studied Chinese at Cornell University. As well as two of Bei Dao's Anvil collections, he has translated 'The Selected Poems of Tu Fu' (1990) and 'The Selected Poems of Li Po' (1998), both also published by Anvil. He lives in Vermont.