Friday Night, Shanghai by Arthur Solway

$20.99

 

With their tight lyric tension and condensed but intricately musical syntax, Solway’s poems are so gemlike, they’ll make you ask yourself how it is that you didn’t already know this poet’s body of work. Well, it’s because somehow, this is his first book. But it’s that rare first book that demonstrates a lifetime’s investment in the art. The consistently understated endings of these poems resonate longer and more deeply than the tympani of a ta-da. International in their orientation, often in dialogue with works of art and literature, Solway’s poems remain intimate, softly-spoken, and durable.

 

–Forrest Gander

 

 

“…listen/ to the spores, the underbelly/ of a mushroom,” poet Arthur Solway begins this collection. But I did not. I read on instead, into light and color, the sound of  “bickering crows,” then children on swings “a clockwork of legs/kicking the dusk,” another way into music. Because this is a book of sensual delights though danger cuts through it where “clouds are like shrapnel” and “blow themselves apart.” Along for the ride are the great spirits and guardians, among them Berryman, Giacometti, Joseph Cornell, Rexroth, Marie Curie. Vast, Solway’s range is that of the ocean: “sparkle” vs. emptiness.

 

–Marianne Boruch

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Description

Friday Night, Shanghai

by Arthur Solway

$20.99, Full-length, paper

979-8-88838-272-1

2023

Friday Night, Shanghai is a love letter to one of the most dynamic cities on the planet. Living as an expatriate in China for well over a decade, Solway’s poems are intimate meditations on what it means to be nomadic at heart, or “stranded in a world that won’t let go.” There are also poems about the transformative powers of art and the lives of artists—Giacometti, Warhol, Joseph Cornell, and Robert Mapplethorpe, as well as to our patron saints of literature such as Berryman, Rexroth, and Beckett. It is a book filled with music, its lyric tension generated through distilled syntax, tone, yet always with an unflinching eye for close observation, and for images that are at once evocative and indelible.

Arthur Solway’s poetry and essays have appeared in The Antioch Review, Barrow Street, BOMB, The London Magazine, Salmagundi, Southern Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. His work has also been featured by the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day. His critical reviews and cultural essays can be found in Artforum, Frieze, and ArtAsiaPacific magazines. Living and working in Shanghai for well over a decade, he was the founding director of the first contemporary art gallery from New York to establish itself in mainland China. A graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, he is a poetry editor for The Shanghai Literary Review and presently lives in Santa Cruz, California.

 

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