How to be A/Political: The Seven Books of the Sun

The great romantic martyr of contemporary Chinese poetry, who killed himself at the age of 25 in 1989, Hai Zi is one of the most studied, recited, and well-known poets of the 20th century in China. Positioned alternately as the bard of the countryside or a "pure" poet, he is a figure believed to have been outside the hurly-burly of Chinese political life. Yet his unfinished epic work, The Seven Books of the Sun, which has little to no scholarship, problematizes that idea.