Overview

"On foot, by rattling truck and local bus, by jeep and motorcycle, American poet and musician Scott Ezell explores the Tibetan borderlands. Plotted with a line drawn on a map in Hong Kong, the journey starts in Dali, in the foothills of the Himalaya in southwestern China. The road extends north a thousand miles through towns and villages along the edge of Tibet, finally arriving at Kekexili, the highest plateau in the world, and crossing the Kunlun Mountains. Ezell takes us through landscapes of blond and gold barley fields, alpine meadows ablaze with wildflowers, silver-blue rivers beneath ""clouds like burning aluminum,"" and impossible snow peaks ""cracking and shattering into jagged resplendence against the sky."" Balancing the epic is the intimate. Fluent in Mandarin, Ezell chats with farmers, shopkeepers, lamas, nomads, and police along way. There is also outrage in Ezell's account, as, over the course of many years and numerous trips, he witnesses the rise of militarization, surveillance, and destructive resource extraction, including open-pit mining and the death of rivers by the blunt force trauma of dams. Readers were first treated to the visceral beauty of Ezell's poetic prose in A Far Corner: Life and Art with the Open Circle Tribe, the story of three years he lived among a community of Indigenous artists on Taiwan's rugged Pacific Coast. The present work continues his exploration of remote peoples and wild landscapes, and reveals an exceptionally talented writer at the height of his craft. Journey to the End of the Empire is both a love song for the earth, and a cry of dissent against environmental destruction, centralized national narratives, and the marginalization of minority peoples."

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9781788692601

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Reviews

A ground-level account of a journey you'll likely not forget and be glad someone else took. Equally sad and funny visions of China's own Manifest Destiny. -Bill Porter/Red Pine Scott Ezell's Journey to the End of the Empire is about remembering in the deepest sense of recovering the creativity and sense of connection that makes us truly human, amidst worlds of radical disjunction and the authored amnesia of authoritarian regimes. -Ian Baker, Author of The Heart of the World: A Journey to the Last Secret Place In Journey to the End of the Empire, Scott Ezell's reflections on the ecological train wreck currently taking place in western China, and his deeply compassionate portrait of the people exiled to the margins of the Chinese juggernaut, are beautifully articulated with a combination of scientific clarity, poetic beauty, and heart-warming humor. -Henrik Drescher, author of China Days: A Visual Journal from China's Wild West Scott Ezell is a musician of words. He is a highly talented, extremely imagistic writer who packs his lyrical prose with action and sensory-driven details. The people and cultures Ezell writes about are unfamiliar to most, but he brings us into them through an insider perspective that's colorful and full of emotion. -Mark Spitzer, author of Season of the Gar Scott Ezell's work casts a long shadow. Its philosophical components are spot on for our time. Ezell renders his insights with frequent humor, but his language is pure heaven. He orchestrates precision of image with music every time. -Karen Swenson, author of The Landlady in Bangkok, National Poetry Series winner

A ground-level account of a journey you'll likely not forget and be glad someone else took. Equally sad and funny visions of China's own Manifest Destiny. -Bill Porter/Red Pine The first ever English-language narrative of Tibet in a truly poetic form. -Ross Anthony, Gates Scholar, Cambridge University Scott Ezell's Journey to the End of the Empire is about remembering in the deepest sense of recovering the creativity and sense of connection that makes us truly human, amidst worlds of radical disjunction and the authored amnesia of authoritarian regimes. -Ian Baker, Author of The Heart of the World: A Journey to the Last Secret Place In Journey to the End of the Empire, Scott Ezell's reflections on the ecological train wreck currently taking place in western China, and his deeply compassionate portrait of the people exiled to the margins of the Chinese juggernaut, are beautifully articulated with a combination of scientific clarity, poetic beauty, and heart-warming humor. -Henrik Drescher, author of China Days: A Visual Journal from China's Wild West Scott Ezell is a musician of words. He is a highly talented, extremely imagistic writer who packs his lyrical prose with action and sensory-driven details. The people and cultures Ezell writes about are unfamiliar to most, but he brings us into them through an insider perspective that's colorful and full of emotion. -Mark Spitzer, author of Season of the Gar Scott Ezell's work casts a long shadow. Its philosophical components are spot on for our time. Ezell renders his insights with frequent humor, but his language is pure heaven. He orchestrates precision of image with music every time. -Karen Swenson, author of The Landlady in Bangkok, National Poetry Series winner

Author Information

Scott Ezell is an American poet, musician, and multi-genre artist with a background in Asia and Indigenous peoples. He was based primarily in Taiwan from 1992 to 2004, and traveled widely in China, India, Japan, and elsewhere during this time. Since 2009 he has worked on a poetry and photography project documenting the effects of centralized state power, civil conflict, and destructive resource extraction on marginalized landscapes and communities in the China-Southeast Asia border zone. He is the author of A Far Corner, a narrative nonfiction account of three years he lived and worked with an Indigenous artist community on the Pacific Coast of Taiwan. He has released a dozen albums of original folk, ambient, and experimental music, and published poetry books including Petroglyph Americana, Carbon Rings, Swallowed by Machines, Shell Games & Ponzi Schemes, and The Front Lines of the War, which was also produced as a sound art and spoken word album. Scott Ezell is based in Chiapas, Mexico.

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