Mirror

Dark and dazzling experiments from a poet who died too young, but who wrote to "transform one's self and life."This bilingual posthumous collection is a detailed, retrospective look at Zhang Zao, one of the more brilliant poetic minds from China of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He left China in 1986 and lived in Germany until his death at 47 in 2010. The poems in this collection span Zhang Zao's short career, beginning with "Mirror," one of his earliest and best known works, and ending with "Lantern Town," written less than two months before his death. As Bei Dao writes in his afterword, Zhang Zao "possessed both a thorough grasp of European literature and culture and an introspective understanding of the broad, profound Asian aesthetics: between the two philosophies, he sought a new tension and melting point." Mirror is his first book to be translated into English and will be bilingual in Chinese and English on facing pages.