On foot, by rattling truck and local bus, by jeep and motorcycle, American poet and musician Scott Ezell explores the Tibetan borderlands. Plotted with a line drawn on a map in Hong Kong, the journey starts in Dali, in the foothills of the Himalaya in southwestern China. The road extends north a thousand miles through towns and villages along the edge of Tibet, finally arriving at Kekexili, the highest plateau in the world, and crossing the Kunlun Mountains.
Ezell takes us through landscapes of blond and gold barley fields, alpine meadows ablaze with wildflowers, silver-blue rivers beneath "clouds like burning aluminum," and impossible snow peaks "cracking and shattering into jagged resplendence against the sky."
Balancing the epic is the intimate. Fluent in Mandarin, Ezell chats with farmers, shopkeepers, lamas, nomads, and police along way. There is also outrage in Ezell's account, as, over the course of many years and numerous trips, he witnesses the rise of militarization, surveillance, and destructive resource extraction, including open-pit mining and the death of rivers by the blunt force trauma of dams.
Readers were first treated to the visceral beauty of Ezell's poetic prose in A Far Corner: Life and Art with the Open Circle Tribe, the story of three years he lived among a community of Indigenous artists on Taiwan's rugged Pacific Coast. The present work continues his exploration of remote peoples and wild landscapes, and reveals an exceptionally talented writer at the height of his craft.
Journey to the End of the Empire is both a love song for the earth, and a cry of dissent against environmental destruction, centralized national narratives, and the marginalization of minority peoples.
Industry Reviews
"A ground-level account of a journey you'll likely not forget and be glad someone else took. Equally sad and funny visions of China's own Manifest Destiny."
-Bill Porter/Red Pine
"Scott Ezell's Journey to the End of the Empire is about remembering in the deepest sense of recovering the creativity and sense of connection that makes us truly human, amidst worlds of radical disjunction and the authored amnesia of authoritarian regimes."
-Ian Baker, Author of The Heart of the World: A Journey to the Last Secret Place
"In Journey to the End of the Empire, Scott Ezell's reflections on the ecological train wreck currently taking place in western China, and his deeply compassionate portrait of the people exiled to the margins of the Chinese juggernaut, are beautifully articulated with a combination of scientific clarity, poetic beauty, and heart-warming humor."
-Henrik Drescher, author of China Days: A Visual Journal from China's Wild West
"Scott Ezell is a musician of words. He is a highly talented, extremely imagistic writer who packs his lyrical prose with action and sensory-driven details. The people and cultures Ezell writes about are unfamiliar to most, but he brings us into them through an insider perspective that's colorful and full of emotion."
-Mark Spitzer, author of Season of the Gar
"Scott Ezell's work casts a long shadow. Its philosophical components are spot on for our time. Ezell renders his insights with frequent humor, but his language is pure heaven. He orchestrates precision of image with music every time."
-Karen Swenson, author of The Landlady in Bangkok, National Poetry Series winner
