Your Face My Flag

by Julian Gewirtz

Overview

Debut poems of stunning power and range from a China scholar and policy advisor

Torn between intimacy and estrangement, eros and politics, history and futurity, Your Face My Flag is a riveting debut poetry collection. Gewirtz explores the place of poetry in a globalized era, shaped by escalating geopolitical tensions between China and “the West.” From the factories where iPhones are assembled to riverside idylls where men have long met for sex, these poems move restlessly across continents and through centuries. In a world that conspires to dull us against the particular, Gewirtz writes with sharp focus, recapturing memory and desire in stunning detail.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781619322653
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	10/18/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	917 KB

About the Author

Julian Gewirtz's poems have appeared in the Best American Poetry, Boston Review, Lambda Literary, The Nation, The New Republic, PEN America, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. He is also the author of two books on the history of modern China, Never Turn Back: China and the Forbidden History of the 1980s and Unlikely Partners ("a gripping read" –The Economist). He co-edited an issue of Logic Magazine on China and technology and has written essays and reviews for publications including the New York Times, The Guardian, Harper’s, Foreign Affairs, Prac Crit, and Parnassus: Poetry in Review. He previously served in the Obama administration and has been Senior Fellow for China Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, an Academy Scholar at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and a lecturer in history at Harvard University and Columbia University.

Read an Excerpt

Spend

seven years inside no visitors and four hours traveling north for one

hour per month with him no more no

phone calls four men watching always

just not the man you want Last fall the pear trees in the courtyard refuse

to ripen—In her verses there are no sounds none—spend a month between

chair and bed without sleep then

two three four five catch

the infection from that skinny guard now it won’t shake—in my eyes

he has always been and will always be an awkward diligent poet—That summer of

crackdown nearly thirty years ago I

bought a bag of apples

one’s malformed tumorous a second head almost a second whole self

inside pushing out skin bulging near breaking—

Travel four hours north

for one hour per month with him no more. Never. Four men watching always

just not the man you want.

 

 

To X

(Written on This Device You Made)

"On the last day of September, a 24-year-old migrant worker...jumped out of a window of a dormitory run by his employer, Foxconn, the huge electronics manufacturing company with a million-strong workforce that makes the majority of the world’s Apple iPhones."

–The Washington Post

 

1.

Pick it up.

Black glass our mirror when it’s

off but it is never

off. Press home button

now. Flex. Press.

My fingerprint my hot oils is that

your finger pressing the button into place now on

assembly line in Shenzhen

before it’s wiped clean

I see you I think I

see you load your

poem onto it, into me, into me now Did you, just like that, standing,

fall asleep Did you fall farther than you meant Did you

mean me to be reading this I want

to touch the sky/feel that blueness so light/

but I can’t do

any of this/so I’m

leaving this

world/I was fine

when I came/ and fine when I

left In this blue touch light

fine rain starts

scrolling down

 

2.

On the contract, there are four options. Two show you will consent and two show you will

not. Do not tick the options which indicate you are not willing. Tick the two which say you

are. If you tick the boxes which say you are not willing, the form will be cancelled.

 

3.

What do you see? Under

razor bright lights

blue hats blue jackets

every identification card

taken away long ago you

came 28 hours by bus

Rules are: no long nails

no yawning no sitting

on the floor no talking

or walking quickly no being

late no transients or preteens

no families If you doze off

and fall against the machines and

there is a live wire no one will

save you The workshop

still as a ravine in autumn

when you slump and slide

back off your stool it’s

a hare breaking out of the

underbrush

 

4.

Workers have up to ten minutes for visits to the toilet Such visits are possible only if a

supervisor is available and willing to stand in for the workers on the shop floor The toilets

are equipped with cameras When a worker’s time is up a loudspeaker calls for him by name

until he returns He returns For now

 

5.

That night rain’s pouring into

the underpass

fills up to the brim—cup of opaque

liquid crystal display—frame—shield—

If you get lost in the city you will be

replaced I have people lined up to

replace you $1.85 per hour no errors

Now you turn your head to see

 the train coming

rain torn by wind, unstoppable rain, fetid rain

It’s scentless They rinse your uniform so many times

it’s scentless

 

6.

I pick it up. I ask it Who made you I don’t understand

Who was the person

who put this phone together Do you mean call history Was it wiped

at the factory or after How many hands touched it before mine I don’t

know myself but I can find out I breathe in it’s your air

 

7.

Motherboard left

your village you

miss her free

garden of plums

ravenala a language

of tightening

screws Do you type

your poems into it

lychee verbena bougainvillea

eucalyptus asbestos flower

at least three screens

a minute at least

twelve hours a day

spray the polish

onto the display

then wipe it dry

if you leave a trace

wipe it again

ten more nets go up

 

8.

The delegation comes to visit the factory the city government seeds the clouds to cause rain

it rains it clears the smog it leaves behind blue skies from the ground silver iodide rockets fly

up into the clouds which condense which fall towards earth: raindrops. The air tastes harder.

The light sleeker. A frozen glass is rinsed in milk.

 

9.

Eighteen, your name meaning Walk Forward,

triple-bunked twelve to a room fences ten feet

tall on the roofs

bedsheets full of ash

dried gum in your finger joints and burrs

pricking behind your right shoulder

When you place it in its box

do you imagine me.

In the testing area the belt keeps running never stops

halfway through the sixteen-hour shift you recall

a corner of roof where one’s torn be quick—

Eighteen your name meaning Walk Forward

Eighteen meaning unfree meaning

falling from a great height

 

10.

You are the one

who installs front

camera with proximity

sensor leaning

over the factory

assembly a shadow—

sensor gains awareness

six hands later in process

but you figure out how

to turn it on early What if

there were a faint summons

they could feel Sensor makes

a square around your

face and focuses A pair

of hands gently opening

a red lacquered door

 

11.

“On his rare days off Xu Lizhi likes to visit bookshops, lingering in the aisles. He frequents

the factory library, and writes poems and reviews. He twice applies unsuccessfully for desk

jobs—as a librarian at the factory and at his favorite Shenzhen bookstore Youyi. When a

local journalist asks him about his future, he says: our lives will become better and better.”

 

12.

I pick it up with my free hand, screenshot, Xu Lizhi, you’re

standing on an overpass in Shenzhen, green plaid shirt,

your right hand holds your left forefinger,

you look older than

anyone your age—light traffic below and the railing’s covered

in stickers, phone numbers . . .

I hold you in my hand you can’t feel

proof of single status physical exam card wastewater pours into the river, paystubs

scurrying like minnows certificate of conformity can’t be both a boy and

a worker, choose one They've trained me to refuse to skip

work, refuse sick leave, refuse to be late, refuse to leave early—

Shenzhen once a fishing village children laugh dashing past

green lychee trees hulls heaped trash and scrub hills above

where now stands a bronze statue of Deng Xiaoping a corridor

made of nonfiction When it happened no one was there to see it

ten more nets go up

 

13.

You are the one

who changes air

filters in the manager’s

office the yellow stained black-caked

filter a seine

that catches night in itself

all night

 

14.

I pick it up, type in your words A screw plunges to the ground

working overtime at night Another worker’s falling asleep on the line

iron moon head jerking It drops straight down with a faint sound that draws

no one’s attention just like before on the same kind

of night a person—

ten more

and grates on every window

 

15.

The boy breathing

next to you 120mm

tweezers turning thin

fingers the smallest

parts he moves by

hand always wears

gloves to touch it

until one morning he

picks it up and

types into it My eyes are

so tired they won’t open

 

16.

I look at it. Locked. Is there space for a distress signal if you wanted

to leave one. I switch silencer off, hit home, it gives me

only one emergency call, no private numbers, but it can take

a picture. Will record whatever I do next. I’ve heard there’s a time

difference with foreign countries, here it’s daytime, there it’s night—

Designed by Apple in California Assembled in China Model A1549

FCC ID BCG-E2816A IC 579C-E2816A IMEI 355790070868852

 

17.

I pick it up

forgive me

I pick it up

 

I Describe to You the YDE Girl

That rope? It is a breathless yes

fingers press into this windy

oboe our throat—one woolen

waistband slip-knotted on neck

keeps you warm below twelve feet

of peat, lineless, a convalescent’s skin

only mud the boy-doctors dig into

unearthing each indivisible number.

How unlike the bark of this beetled elm,

its jagged beams and flagging crown

fine as the hair of a queen anemic—

hissing to be mistreated—this caused my beauty—

Table of Contents

Time Difference

At Final Destination, 11:06 p.m. 3

Arrival at Container Port, Est. 1842 5

After the One-Day Trial, January 2014 7

Prisoner of the State 15

Spend 16

To X (Written on This Device You Made) 17

Aubade, as the Addressee 35

From a Short History of the West

From A Short History of the West 39

The West's All Here 40

I Describe to You the Weerdinge Men 42

I Describe to You the Yde Girl 43

From A Short History of the West 44

1680, New Territories 46

From A Short History of the West 48

Of Discovery: A Letter 53

Social Studies 54

Arm'd and Fearless 56

From A Short History of the West 57

The Dream of Possession

Not about Love 61

Own Weather 62

Incomplete List of Unequal Treaties 70

Reading at the Window (The Golden Age of Time) 71

Hardcore Innocence in Hangzhou 73

A Being within an Envelope (George Staunton) 75

Western Sketches 77

1 Teen Idyll

2 Absent in the Spring

3 Shelter in Place

4 The Bliss of Solitude

5 Travelers Returned

Excavation 82

Notes 88

Acknowledgments 91

About the Author 93

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Your Face My Flag

“Julian Gewirtz’s exquisite debut collection . . . [renders] desire and self-determination: from the ironically redundant evasions of Cupid’s arrival (‘when he is not / here, it is as if // he is not here’) to more adverse obliquities that gay westerners internalize (‘looking at you from across / the street in a crowd’) and that Chinese citizens must navigate as China descends into ever more dire forms of control and surveillance (‘To use a man for his shadow / is to make a thing of him’). In poems about the dissidents Liu Xiaobo, Liu Xia, and Xu Zhiyong, and about an iPhone assembler who committed suicide at a Chinese factory (‘When you place it in its box / do you imagine me’), Gewirtz, a specialist on China’s modern transformations, combats state-imposed alienation, imagining the inner lives of people that the authorities would erase. His poems on western culture make an aesthetic of indirection—a Vermeer’s interiority (‘that world outside where she isn’t’), a bog body’s ‘mute deserted face’—integral to his style of erudite disquiet. The effect is austere but beautifully illuminating.”—David Woo, Harriet Books, Poetry Foundation

"Wonderfully enough, Gewirtz’s collection is no epic, nor does it want to be. Instead, these poems revitalize an aspect of lyric poetry easily lost sight of—not that a poem must include history, but that a poem occurs within history and against it, too. . . . In this world where even the weather can be weaponized (see 'Own Weather'), Gewirtz writes lyrics not to spite history, but despite it. His vision recalls Wallace Stevens’s definition of lyric work: 'A violence within that protects us from a violence without.' The hope here isn’t to resolve or absolve us of our human complexity, but the ethic is better: to keep it open."—Dan Beachy-Quick, Colorado Review

"I am entranced by the erudition and imagination of Julian Gewirtz’s Your Face My Flag. In powerful short lyrics that compress feeling into something lapidary or in longer sequences that give us multiple perspectives on desire, history, war, and myth, Gewirtz strikes me with the scale of his thinking, drawing equally from autobiography and from his vast expertise on Chinese history and politics, but never foregoing pleasure, humanity, and the primacy of the senses.”—Richie Hoffman, Chicago Review of Books

"What underlies Gewirtz’s broad vision and imagination? Gewirtz the historian sees large without losing sight of turning points that could have turned otherwise. Gewirtz the poet sees small, limning his subjects’ constraints without sacrificing their freedom. As the historian searches for coherence, the poet weaves possible futures. The poet may be the better historian. The grace of the historian poet is to caution us that neither individual nor communal history is foreordained."—Sabina Knight, Los Angeles Review of Books

"In a collection that’s vividly detailed and layered, Gewirtz proves to be a wonderful storyteller, covering a wide range of subjects and frequently addressing social justice issues."—Library Journal

"In a global moment dominated by geopolitics among nations and ceaseless technological change, we have an almost desperate need for poetry, to remind us of our shared inwardness. Your Face My Flag fulfills that deepest human need."—John Delury, Global Asia

"I absolutely loved the poetry collection Your Face My Flag from Julian Gewirtz. Beautiful, subtle poems about art, travel, love, and the distances we try to cross."—Molly Dektar, BiblioLifestyle

“There’s astonishing range to Julian Gewirtz’s Your Face My Flag, from technology’s dehumanizing fallout to the weaponizing of the weather itself, from the history of relations between China and the West to sexual cruising. The poems explore the blur of desire and politics, of intimacy and empire, and in so doing, they make not just a space for the erotic but an argument for the erotic as strange restive haven, as permission: ‘Everyone who loves me/begs me not to do/the dangerous thing.//Only you would let me.’ I’m grateful for that—grateful, too, for the risks and provocations to which Gewirtz invites us in this resonant debut.”—Carl Phillips, author of Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007–2020

“Gewirtz's courageous collection of poems spans history, memory, and desire. It invents a language to describe the injustice and cruelty below the surface of the global economy and restore a humanity to its victims. These deep and allusive poems, in dialogue with Shakespeare and Whitman, are at the same time unflinchingly attentive to the present moment and what Gewirtz calls ‘history on the loose’. Ultimately, his poems express what it might mean to be a human and a citizen in a world driven by the forces of unchecked technological advancement.”—Xiaolu Guo, author of the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Nine Continents

“‘The new world was my husband,’ writes Julian Gewirtz, "like a surgeon specializing in the removal of voice.’ These poems are uneasy relations between superpowers, studies in diplomacy and international trade made personal. Their sweep is historical; tone, erotic; mind, vast. In a world of invasive policing and artificial intelligence, Gewirtz makes a passionate case for our fragile human selves. It is an enchanting and affirming sensibility at work.”—D.A. Powell, author of Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys

“Your Face My Flag is inflected with the inescapable desires that pulse through political urgencies, the contradictions in the laws of love, a self-aware lyric position. Gewirtz writes, ‘To use a man for his shadow/ is to make a thing of him,’ a line that encapsulates the tender attention and thoughtfulness he brings to this complex subject.”—Carmen Gimenez Smith, author of Be Recorder

Praise for Never Turn Back: China and the Forbidden History of the 1980s and Unlikely Partners: Chinese Reformers, Western Economists and the Making of Global China

“Gewirtz’s book [is] a gripping read, highlighting what was little short of a revolution in China’s economic thought.”―The Economist

“Gewirtz’s account . . . is masterful: detailed, balanced, and illuminating . . . This is a revelatory account of China’s economic evolution, its debt to Western economic thought, and its love-hate relationship with capitalism.”―Publishers Weekly, starred review

“A remarkable book, written with poise and confidence . . . and illuminates the beginnings of an economic idea that would transform China and change the world.”―Project Syndicate

“This book is… a tour de force on China, the theory of policy advising, and the history of economic thought, all rolled into one.”―Marginal Revolution

“Provides a gracefully written narrative of the unusual experiments with mixing economic forms that facilitated China’s economic boom…Nicely crafted and carefully argued.”―Los Angeles Review of Books

“Gewirtz provides a dramatic and freshly detailed account of the terrifying years from 1976 to 1993, when China’s central leaders held their breath and pushed their country into the unknown by beginning to liberalize its economy.” —Foreign Affairs

From the Publisher

09/01/2022

Gewirtz's debut poetry collection reflects his work as a scholar and policy adviser specializing in China (e.g., Unlikely Partners), with many poems focusing on life in China and the geopolitical tensions between China and the West. The collection opens with a piece centered on Destination Club, which may be the only official and openly gay club in Beijing, and a haunting 17-part poem chronicles the suicide of a migrant worker at a China-based Foxconn factory that produces iPhones: "If you doze off/ and fall against the machines and/ there is a live wire no one will/ save you The workshop/ still as a ravine in autumn." Other poems range across continents and centuries, moving from mummified bodies uncovered in bogs in the Netherlands to "Own Weather," which considers a 1996 report by the U.S. Department of the Air Force proposing that by 2025 U.S. aerospace could "own the weather" through weather modification. Throughout, the author draws inspiration from artists ranging from Shakespeare and William Wordsworth to Fiona Apple. VERDICT In a collection that's vividly detailed and layered, Gewirtz proves to be a wonderful storyteller, covering a wide range of subjects and frequently addressing social justice issues. Recommended for all collections.—Sarah Michaelis

Library Journal