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.