Running Away - by Ha Jin (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Timely, urgent, and wholly authentic, Running Away gathers a chorus of migrant voices to document a desperate journey toward freedom.

Vivid, honest, and boldly resilient, Ha Jin's latest poetry collection, Running Away, adopts a chorus of narrative voices to tell stories of desperate migration. These poems shift in language and geography, they move across borders and "echo the voices / of those who pant and groan / under heavy loads." Often returning to the path of undocumented migrants trekking to the United States by way of South America, these poems navigate dangers and visceral fears, they are pulled forward by the migrant's hope and desire for liberty in a new country--for "the land destined to become their home." Speaking out against authoritarian governments, Ha Jin unambiguously celebrates departure and praises freedom.

Review Quotes

Praise for Ha Jin

"Ha Jin is no stranger to history. He documented the Cultural Revolution in his award-winning Waiting... He recorded the phenomenon of Asian immigration in A Good Fall... He memorialized the Korean War in War Trash... He has told the Asian American story in a multitude of incarnations. It is as if his whole purpose in writing is to record the business of jarring cultural change."--Marie Arana, Washington Post

"One might easily take The Banished Immortal, his first work of nonfiction, as a departure from his previous work. But a close reading suggests that it is a return to his early themes, and a tribute to the poet he was before making his mark as a novelist... The Banished Immortal is a biography, but it is also a document in which a rootless writer nods to the past inside him. Writing about Li Bai--his life, his work, and his country--Jin finally returns home."--Han Zhang, New Yorker

"Mixing autobiography with invented other voices, [Between Silences] is an extraordinary meditation on what it means to have lived the history of China in the second half of the twentieth century. At its best, Ha Jin's language is as accessible, penetrating, and mysterious as Pound's Cathay."--Frank Bidart

About the Author

The poet Ha Jin grew up in mainland China and came to the United States in 1985 to do graduate work at Brandeis University, beginning to write in English in 1990. Since then, he has written four volumes of poetry: Between Silences (1990), Facing Shadows (1996), Wreckage (2001), and A Distant Center (2018). In addition, he has published nine novels, four books of short fiction, and a biography of the poet Li Bai. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. For his work, Ha Jin has earned the National Book Award, two PEN/Faulkner Awards, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Asian American Literary Award, and the Townsend Prize for Fiction. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and is a professor of English and creative writing at Boston University.