Julian Gewirtz's poems have appeared in the Best American
Poetry, Boston Review, Lambda Literary, The Nation, The New
Republic, PEN America, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, and
elsewhere. He is also the author of two books on the history of
modern China, Never Turn Back: China and the Forbidden History of
the 1980s and Unlikely Partners ("a gripping read" The Economist).
He co-edited an issue of Logic Magazine on China and technology and
has written essays and reviews for publications including the New
York Times, The Guardian, Harper's, Foreign Affairs, Prac Crit, and
Parnassus: Poetry in Review. He previously served in the Obama
administration and has been Senior Fellow for China Studies at the
Council on Foreign Relations, an Academy Scholar at Harvard's
Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and a lecturer in
history at Harvard University and Columbia University.
Praise for Your Face My Flag “Julian Gewirtz’s exquisite debut
collection . . . [renders] desire and self-determination: from the
ironically redundant evasions of Cupid’s arrival (‘when he is not /
here, it is as if // he is not here’) to more adverse obliquities
that gay westerners internalize (‘looking at you from across / the
street in a crowd’) and that Chinese citizens must navigate as
China descends into ever more dire forms of control and
surveillance (‘To use a man for his shadow / is to make a thing of
him’). In poems about the dissidents Liu Xiaobo, Liu Xia, and Xu
Zhiyong, and about an iPhone assembler who committed suicide at a
Chinese factory (‘When you place it in its box / do you imagine
me’), Gewirtz, a specialist on China’s modern transformations,
combats state-imposed alienation, imagining the inner lives of
people that the authorities would erase. His poems on western
culture make an aesthetic of indirection—a Vermeer’s interiority
(‘that world outside where she isn’t’), a bog body’s ‘mute deserted
face’—integral to his style of erudite disquiet. The effect is
austere but beautifully illuminating.”—David Woo, Harriet Books,
Poetry Foundation “Wonderfully enough, Gewirtz’s collection is no
epic, nor does it want to be. Instead, these poems revitalize an
aspect of lyric poetry easily lost sight of—not that a poem must
include history, but that a poem occurs within history and against
it, too. . . . In this world where even the weather can be
weaponized (see 'Own Weather'), Gewirtz writes lyrics not to spite
history, but despite it. His vision recalls Wallace Stevens’s
definition of lyric work: 'A violence within that protects us from
a violence without.' The hope here isn’t to resolve or absolve us
of our human complexity, but the ethic is better: to keep it
open.”—Dan Beachy-Quick, Colorado Review"Fascinating[,] passionate,
meditative, and conflicted. . . . These poems embody a new
sensibility in American poetry for the twenty-first century."—Kevin
Gallagher, Harvard Review
“I am entranced by the erudition and imagination of Julian
Gewirtz’s Your Face My Flag. In powerful short lyrics that compress
feeling into something lapidary or in longer sequences that give us
multiple perspectives on desire, history, war, and myth, Gewirtz
strikes me with the scale of his thinking, drawing equally from
autobiography and from his vast expertise on Chinese history and
politics, but never foregoing pleasure, humanity, and the primacy
of the senses.”—Richie Hoffman, Chicago Review of Books “What
underlies Gewirtz’s broad vision and imagination? Gewirtz the
historian sees large without losing sight of turning points that
could have turned otherwise. Gewirtz the poet sees small, limning
his subjects’ constraints without sacrificing their freedom. As the
historian searches for coherence, the poet weaves possible futures.
The poet may be the better historian. The grace of the historian
poet is to caution us that neither individual nor communal history
is foreordained.”—Sabina Knight, Los Angeles Review of Books “In a
collection that’s vividly detailed and layered, Gewirtz proves to
be a wonderful storyteller, covering a wide range of subjects and
frequently addressing social justice issues.”—Library Journal “In a
global moment dominated by geopolitics among nations and ceaseless
technological change, we have an almost desperate need for poetry,
to remind us of our shared inwardness. Your Face My Flag fulfills
that deepest human need.”—John Delury, Global Asia “I absolutely
loved the poetry collection Your Face My Flag from Julian Gewirtz.
Beautiful, subtle poems about art, travel, love, and the distances
we try to cross.”—Molly Dektar, BiblioLifestyle “There’s
astonishing range to Julian Gewirtz’s Your Face My Flag, from
technology’s dehumanizing fallout to the weaponizing of the weather
itself, from the history of relations between China and the West to
sexual cruising. The poems explore the blur of desire and politics,
of intimacy and empire, and in so doing, they make not just a space
for the erotic but an argument for the erotic as strange restive
haven, as permission: ‘Everyone who loves me/begs me not to do/the
dangerous thing.//Only you would let me.’ I’m grateful for
that—grateful, too, for the risks and provocations to which Gewirtz
invites us in this resonant debut.”—Carl Phillips, author of Then
the War: And Selected Poems, 2007–2020 “Gewirtz's courageous
collection of poems spans history, memory, and desire. It invents a
language to describe the injustice and cruelty below the surface of
the global economy and restore a humanity to its victims. These
deep and allusive poems, in dialogue with Shakespeare and Whitman,
are at the same time unflinchingly attentive to the present moment
and what Gewirtz calls ‘history on the loose’. Ultimately, his
poems express what it might mean to be a human and a citizen in a
world driven by the forces of unchecked technological
advancement.”—Xiaolu Guo, autho of the National Book Critics Circle
Award-winning Nine Continents “‘The new world was my husband,’
writes Julian Gewirtz, "like a surgeon specializing in the removal
of voice.’ These poems are uneasy relations between superpowers,
studies in diplomacy and international trade made personal. Their
sweep is historical; tone, erotic; mind, vast. In a world of
invasive policing and artificial intelligence, Gewirtz makes a
passionate case for our fragile human selves. It is an enchanting
and affirming sensibility at work.”—D.A. Powell, author of Useless
Landscape, or A Guide for Boys “Your Face My Flag is inflected with
the inescapable desires that pulse through political urgencies, the
contradictions in the laws of love, a self-aware lyric position.
Gewirtz writes, ‘To use a man for his shadow/ is to make a thing of
him,’ a line that encapsulates the tender attention and
thoughtfulness he brings to this complex subject.”—Carmen Gimenez
Smith, author of Be Recorder “Adviser to the Biden administration
on China, international affairs specialist Julian Gewirtz portrays
that country’s unacknowledged labor force in Your Face My Flag
(Copper Canyon, Fall).”—Library Journal “Fascinating[,] passionate,
meditative, and conflicted. . . . These poems embody a new
sensibility in American poetry for the twenty-first century.”—Kevin
Gallagher, Harvard Review Praise for Julian Gewirtz “Gewirtz’s book
[is] a gripping read, highlighting what was little short of a
revolution in China’s economic thought.”―Economist “Gewirtz’s
account . . . is masterful: detailed, balanced, and illuminating .
. . This is a revelatory account of China’s economic evolution, its
debt to Western economic thought, and its love-hate relationship
with capitalism.”―Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW “A remarkable
book, written with poise and confidence . . . and illuminates the
beginnings of an economic idea that would transform China and
change the world.”―Project Syndicate “This book is… a tour de force
on China, the theory of policy advising, and the history of
economic thought, all rolled into one.”―Marginal Revolution
“Provides a gracefully written narrative of the unusual experiments
with mixing economic forms that facilitated China’s economic
boom…Nicely crafted and carefully argued.”―Los Angeles Review of
Books “Gewirtz provides a dramatic and freshly detailed account of
the terrifying years from 1976 to 1993, when China’s central
leaders held their breath and pushed their country into the unknown
by beginning to liberalize its economy.”—Foreign Affairs
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