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Beijing is a city of multitudes, filled with contradictions and constantly in flux. It is a place for dreamers and schemers, musicians and migrant workers, techies and teachers, cat ladies and cab drivers—and at the same time, a place for none of them, a seat of power that can feel unwelcoming and closed. In his debut book, Anthony Tao opens the gates to the tree-lined streets, dusty alleys, mirthful canals, fashionable rooftops and sweaty nightclubs of China’s political and cultural nerve center, and invites readers to experience the exhilaration, hardship, and heartbreak of trying to put down roots in this gritty, unrelenting metropolis.

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FORTHCOMING AND PREVIOUS READINGS

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REVIEWS AND PUBLICITY

Asian Cha: “I drove to Ridgewood, Queens, to see a poetry reading by Anthony Tao, whom I’d met a few months earlier at his bar, the Golden Weasel, in Beijing. A former sports reporter, he stayed on in Beijing after an assignment there, hosting literary events and reading his poetry around town. Eventually he opened his bar, a small space in one of the old parts of the city, where he continues to host poetry readings. Both his bar and his poetry exist in the never-ending twilight space of Beijing’s expat community—slim novels like Harold Acton’s Peonies and Ponies, set in Beijing, satirise it well, its hustlers and aesthetes, and its opportunists. Anthony’s writing is aware of this context and exploits it. Like many Americans who have lived long-term in China, he comes across as simultaneously outgoing and reserved. It’s as if he has visibly signed that he is sitting on a store of crucial knowledge that he is not about to let go of.” —Matt Turner

The Beijinger: “A key theme of the book is how tumultuous it can often be living in this city, and for those of us who have lived here over the years and seen multiple friends and venues bid farewell to the capital, it is particularly touching.” —Katie Coy

Sinica Podcast: “He is a poet and a very gifted one, as you will soon see, who captures in verse the soul of Beijing better than anyone I’ve come across.” —Kaiser Kuo

Heavy Feather Review: “We Met in Beijing works in several ways. It adopts a confessional mode, naming names, places, and conversations of a specific group at a specific place and time. In this way, the focus on the personal helps to render the poems more universal as Tao contemplates aging, change, and loss. This mode gives way to a poetics of witness.” —David Harrison Horton

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PRAISE FOR WE MET IN BEIJING

“Anthony Tao has become the Poet Laureate of Beijing. His poems are ongoing records of the metabolism of the city, its circadian rhythms, the urban dopamine rush, the queasy malaise of the lockdown era, and that stubborn organic force that persists against the weight of history. His poems are enduring time capsules of the Beijing we leave behind, and the Beijing we take with us.”

—David Moser, Sinologist, jazz pianist, author of A Billion Voices: China’s Search for a Common Language

“Anthony Tao brings China utterly, pungently, viscerally to life. He writes in three dimensions and five senses. I savored this astonishing writing.”

—Evan Osnos, author of the National Book Award-winning Age of Ambition

“Tao is a poet in the tradition of Li Bai—a moving chronicler of his times, a foreigner in his own land, and a poet for whom friendship is bittersweet. We Met in Beijing is an intimate journey through the ‘coarse aesthetics’ of China’s capital city—the sky’s ‘dust texture,’ the ‘ancient alleys,’ roadside pyres of cardboard, old men perched on stools, the flood of summer rains, donkey burgers and noodles, and of course, the bars. Tao has seen it all, and he records everything with an acuity and a humanity that evokes a time after time, an endless, enraptured duration: ‘Time left. We stayed.’”

—Simon Shieh, poet, author of Master

“Anthony Tao writes about his life in his birth city, Beijing, the nightclubs and restaurants, the hutongs (local streets), his neighbors, taxi drivers, social and political changes, and his dreams and disillusions…The poems in his debut book illuminate the best and the worst of China, as well as his sensibility as a poet and as a news editor.”

—Ming Di, poet, translator, editor

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ISBN 979-8-9900249-0-8 (pbk.)

Cover art by Johanna Søvik