Sidetracks

"Bei Dao’s Sidetracks, translated with cinematic eloquence by Jeffrey Yang, defines the poet’s choice of the road less traveled as resistance against both totalitarianism and aesthetic orthodoxy. A leading figure of meng long shi – or “misty,” “no direction home” poetry – who galvanized the 1989 pro-democracy movement in China, Bei Dao employs paradox and parataxis to portray his misguided Red Guard youth as “prisoner of the lost road” and the time lost via exile and regained via the poetic imagination."