Li Bai Rides a Celestial Dolphin Home

​The day after their wedding, Tom and Sharyn Sexton set off on the more than 4,500-mile journey from Massachusetts to Alaska. Now, more than fifty years later, Tom Sexton is retracing those steps through his exceptional poetry. He describes the communities they passed through and ruminates on the changes, good and bad, that have taken place in the decades since. He still finds hope in the country and draws transformative hope from the land that connects all of us. Appropriate for a journey that moves from east to west, the Sexton's real-life voyage is embedded in the imaginary journey of the ancient Chinese poet, Li Bai, from Broad Pass to Polychrome Pass in the Alaska Range. Tom Sexton is professor emeritus of English at the University of Alaska Anchorage and was Alaska's Poet laureate from 1994 until 2000. He is the author of several collections of poetry including For the Sake of the Light and I Think Again of Those Ancient Chinese Poets, both from the University of Alaska Press.