'The day / seems more and more distant," writes Liu Xiaobo in the final elegy of this powerful and important book of poems. "And yet for me / it remains a needle inside my body."
The day of which Liu writes is June 4, 1989, known around the world as the Tiananmen Square protests, and within dissident circles in China as the June 4th massacre.
More than two decades later, it is unclear how many activists gave their lives to the struggle. The Chinese government has yet to offer an official apology. One thing, however, is certain. Liu has dedicated his life to remember those who did.
For 20 years, Liu has written an elegy on the anniversary of the event: for mothers who lost sons, for a country he believes lost its hope. They have been written in freedom, and they have been composed from prison.
Between 1989 and 1999, Liu's agitation for change cost him six years of his life. He was released but never left alone. In 2009, after what has been described as constant harassment, he was sentenced to 11 more years in prison. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 and was celebrated with an empty chair in Stockholm.
China's transformation into a quasi-capitalist economy has been cheered and feared by the West. Liu views it with bitterness in these elegies. "The ease with which money / forgives bayonets and lies," he marvels with disgust in one poem.
Many of these poems look less at the fallen and more at the state Liu believes has betrayed them. In his language China is sick, promiscuous, dying of a disease born from its dynastic roots: a blood lust confused with procreation.
Readers not versed in Chinese history are given some guidance. They are well served by translator Jeffrey Yang's notes. Still, the best poems in this volume earn their horrific vision through imagery that captures the spooky intimacy of life under censorship. "Surveillance devices also recorded / the wails and the weeping," Liu Xiaobo writes in another elegy.
