Night Train to Shanghai
Night Train to Shanghai
Night Train To Shanghai, Gerald Nicosia's fourth collection of poetry, traces the writer's love affair with a country he had trouble even imagining in his Fifties childhood in the American Midwest. Among the surprises in store for him were adopting his first child, Wu Ji (who became the American Amy), in Hefie; teaching his great literary love, the Beat poets, to Chinese graduate students at Sichuan University in Chengdu; and taking the train ride of his life on a night express between Beijing and Shanghai. These are poems of an American face to face with America's greatest terror, Communist China, and finding that dreaded foe wearing human faces just like the ones he has known elsewhere. And they are the poems of a father learning to know his adopted daughter in the land that gave birth to her.
ISBN 978-0-9839264-3-6
Primarily known as a first-rate literary and social historian (Memory Babe, Home to War), Gerald Nicosia has given us in Night Train to Shanghai something I, for one, would never have imagined coming from him: a fluent, heart-felt, large-minded narrative poem about visits he made to modern China both by himself and with his wife and two children—one of whom was a Chinese orphan. Nicosia brings alive this huge land—in essence, the new America—as nothing else I’ve read has done, and at the same time emerges as a wonderfully witty, rueful, seasoned passenger, the perfect companion on the journey.
–Aram Saroyan, author Last Rites, Day and Night, and Complete Minimal Poems
Night Train to Shanghai reads as smoothly and directly as one of China’s high speed trains. Stories, attitudes, glimpses of life, politics and policies, museums and temples, all flow by the poet learning to see with more than Western eyes.
–Joanne Kyger, author of About Now and The Japan and India Journals
There’s good observation in Night Train to Shanghai; there’s good feeling it; there’s warmth and original wit. What Nicosia has written is a travelogue and meditation partly on aging and on travel and on his feelings for China and the Chinese. I have admiration for this book.
–Herbert Gold, author of Fathers, Bohemia, and Still Alive
