Anthony Tao’s debut poetry book, “We Met in Beijing,” captures the exhilaration, hardship, and heartbreak of trying to put down roots in a Chinese metropolis. He will be in Shanghai on Tuesday, June 11 for a one-night-only reading at I Love Shanghai Bar, starting at 8pm. An American who was born in Beijing, Tao returned from the U.S. in 2008 and never left. He has keenly felt the changes of the past sixteen years and uses poetry as a way to capture a little of the bygone days, like preserving memories in sap, while reflecting on the reasons we choose to stay. Tao’s poetry has appeared in literary magazines such as Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Frontier, Shanghai Literary Review, Poetry Lab Shanghai, Asian Cha, etc. Sinologist David Moser calls him “the poet laureate of Beijing,” and award-winning journalist Evan Osnos says about his debut collection, “Anthony Tao brings China utterly, pungently, viscerally to life…I savored this astonishing writing.”