Your Face My Flag
In Julian Gewirtz’s exquisite debut collection, Your Face My Flag, an American scholar of China arrives at Destination, a gay nightclub in Beijing, where he picks up a man whom he calls “my new country” and deploys a capacious knowledge of Chinese art and history, including ancient emblems of imperial homosexuality (peaches, sleeve), to embrace his new lover even while distancing him:
[…] I see our faces everywhere, in a scroll’s landscape
left blank where the figure’s eyes fall, in a bowl
of half-eaten peaches, a cut sleeve, any sleeping body
turned away from view. […]
This motif of distancing—“turned away from view”—permeates Gewirtz’s renderings of 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. In “Not About Love,” the technology that might forge an erotic connection leads instead to the kind of solitary discipline that artists and scholars endure for their work:
Someday the scientists will devise
a way for me to hold
you without even needing
to walk across the room.
It will take practice.
The empire of discipline,
cold and heavy.