Yesterday's library haul: Gingerbread Baby, and June Fourth Elegies by Liu Xiaobo, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. I might have picked up this book because I took the author for a Nobel Prize laureate in Literature 😊. It is a collection of poems written over many years, in prison, in labour camp or at home, on the anniversaries of the Tiananmen Square protests. Some are more to my taste than others.
As facing the sea reveals the sky
and facing the sky reveals the sea
facing my soul reveals your soul
pickReading this was an ordeal, not because Liu's poetry is bad (it isn't), but because of the unrelenting twenty-year stare down the wrong end of a gun barrel, at the blood dripping off a bayonet's edge, at the bloody smears left on the pavement of Tiananmen Square by tank tracks, and at the despair felt by the poet over the lives lost to authoritarian oppression, at the collective wilful forgetting of what happened on a day seared into his memory.
😥
I've added about ten books to my library wishlist whilst looking on the catalogue for a poetry book that fits the Read Harder Challenge. I'm not sure if I can bear this one, memorializing the Tiannamen protests. But the cover is tempting.
June Fourth Elegies | 
