In the eighties, Liao Yiwu was a young poet whose only vital horizon was made up of literature and the dissipation Bohemian use. But the bloody suppression of the student revolts that took place the Chinese government, whose paradigmatic image is Tiananmen, would mark him deeply and led him to write poems as "Slaughter" and "Requiem" (the latter also prepared a film version, with the help of friends and collaborators). From that moment everything would change for him to unimaginable extremes. Considered a counterrevolutionary, an enemy of China, Yiwu spend years in prison in prison, lost in a Kafkaesque and concentration camps, awaiting a sentence that never had just arrived journey, and trying not to die in the meantime. And that is the agonizing struggle Yiwu tells us in this unforgettable book: a struggle against physical and mental collapse, a struggle against despair, hunger and torture. A fight for the dignity of the living and the dead. "In this book, torment and grace are constant companions marching closely together," says Herta Müller, and possibly this is the best definition of why the one song, one hundred songs. Book this special life of a poet in Chinese prisons it is. While the pain and bitterness of the memories that run these pages, and the sleepless nightmare of a thousand horrors that the author saw and suffered, are undeniable, the fact remains that Yiwu know imbue the story of his experiences in a mood and poetry (to the stark and deeply human time) which only extend the reach and resonance of a must read.