Sidetracks, Bei Dao's first new collection in almost fifteen years, is also the poet's first long poem and his magnum opus--the artistic culmination of a lifetime devoted to the renewal and reinvention of language. "As a poet, I am always lost," Bei Dao once said. Opening with a prologue of heavenly questions and followed by thirty-four cantos, Sidetracks travels forward and backward along the divergent paths of the poet's wandering life--from...