Friday Night, Shanghai

Friday Night, Shanghai is a love letter to one of the most dynamic cities on the planet. Living as an expatriate in China for well over a decade, Solway's poems are intimate meditations on what it means to be nomadic at heart, or "stranded in a world that won't let go." There are also poems about the transformative powers of art and the lives of artists-Giacometti, Warhol, Joseph Cornell, and Robert Mapplethorpe, as well as to our patron saints of literature such as Berryman, Rexroth, and Beckett. It is a book filled with music, its lyric tension generated through distilled syntax, tone, yet always with an unflinching eye for close observation, and for images that are at once evocative and indelible.