In 2002, after living ten years in Asia, American poet and musician Scott Ezell used his advance from a local record company to move to Dulan, on Taiwan’s remote Pacific coast. He fell in with the Open Circle Tribe, a loose confederation of aboriginal woodcarvers, painters, and musicians who lived on the beach and cultivated a living connection with their indigenous heritage. Most members of the Open Circle Tribe belong to the Amis tribe, which is descended from Austronesian peoples that migrated from China thousands of years ago. As a “nonstate” people navigating the fraught politics of contemporary Taiwan, the Amis of the Open Circle Tribe exhibit, for Ezell, the best characteristics of life at the margins, striving to create art and to live autonomous, unorthodox lives. 
In Dulan, Ezell joined song circles and was invited on an extended hunting expedition; he weathered typhoons, had love affairs, and lost close friends. In A Far Corner Ezell draws on these experiences to explore issues on a more global scale, including the multiethnic nature of modern society, the geopolitical relationship between the United States, Taiwan, and China, and the impact of environmental degradation on indigenous populations. The result is a beautifully crafted and personal evocation of a sophisticated culture that is almost entirely unknown to Western readers.

A Far Corner: Life and Art with the Open Circle Tribe

Biographies & Memoirs

Ezell, Scott

Community & Culture

University Of Nebraska Press

Journey to the End of the Empire: On the Road in Eastern Tibet

Review\n"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\n"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\n"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\n"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\n"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\nOn 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.

Politics & Social Sciences

Anthropology

Camphor Press

Camphor Press Ltd

Poetry. Asian and Asian American Studies. PETROGLYPH AMERICANA is a book-length poem that careens across landscapes of the American West and resonates with Scott Ezell's dozen years in Asia. By turns narrative and lyrical, PETROGLYPH AMERICANA is a journey through Death Valley and Las Vegas, through the Great Basin and San Francisco's administrative assistance industry, and through the history of the Gold Rush and an LA traffic jam—all with reflections from Asian landscapes, cultures, and poetry. PETROGLYPH AMERICANA embraces the lust, freedom, exuberance, and folly of America, distilling a geographic, cultural, and ecological sense of place.

Petroglyph Americana

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Empty Bowl

Poetry. "These vivid poems give a sense of Hanoi as an Asian City of Dreadful Night, dense with temptation and lost hopes, in which this young American poet (to quote James Thompson) 'writes in the dust' his 'heart's deep languor' in poems of sharp diction and rich imagery."—John Balaban

Hanoi Rhapsodies

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Books by Ezell, Scott