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Hometown is everyone's retreat. Miner poet Chen Nienxi's new collection of essays talks about his hometown and explores the roots of literature! This book is a sincere collection of the works of Chen Nianxi's literary column "Xiahe Flows to the West" in "Southern Weekend". He is an Odyssey in the mines and a wanderer of words. His nearly twenty years of wandering have ended with great joy. His body is stained with fine dust and he returns to his hometown to search. An in-depth dialogue with clouds, soil, mountains and forests, and memories of time, condensed into 27 masterpieces about the hometown. Where does the Xiahe River come from and where does it go? The answers given by the people of Xiahe River are in the book, and they are all in the rhyme of the times. In the artist's field, he specially painted 30 pen and ink paintings, embellishing the people, things and things in the Xiahe River. "People do two things throughout their lives, leaving home and returning home, which takes a lot of effort and even narrow escapes. In fact, it is not two things, it is one thing, because leaving home is also returning home, but in a different direction or way. Hometown is an important part of destiny. I would like to dedicate this book to my hometown that has disappeared, and to the people who are rushing and scattered in the dust. In the era when our hometown disappears, I hope we all have a hometown!"

Many people remember Chen Nianxi, the "miner's poet", because of the phrase "No matter how humble a person is, there are rivers in his bones." Side A of his life is the suffocating blasting work 5,000 meters underground; side B is his talent and persistence in writing everything into poetry. "Chen Nianxi's Poems" contains 171 new works by Chen Nianxi in recent years, divided into four volumes: the first volume (By the Gorge River), about childhood and memories; the second volume (How slow is the change in the heart), about the gathering and separation of friends and the repair of love. , Concern about family affection; the third series of departures and arrivals, from Xinjiang in the north to Guizhou in the south, writing a poem for each place where he wandered; the fourth series (running children) is filled with poetry between modern industrial civilization and soft human nature. Chen Nianxi's poems include both rough romance and simple pride; sometimes they burst like iron, sometimes they are as gentle as lights; they have both classical temperament and modern expression. It can even be said that Chen Nianxi's bones are filled with mighty poems. He wrote about life: "Life can sometimes be so exciting that even death can't disturb it." He wrote about love: "Our understanding of love is always too complicated. In addition to the blooming brocades, there are also fine stitches." He wrote about memory: "Memory is like an old book, the important chapters have been lost." He wrote about beauty: "There are many beautiful things in the world, some are as complex as dreams, and some are as simple as flowers." Reading poetry is luxurious, and reading poetry is worthwhile. From Chen Nianxi's poems, readers can gain richer life experiences again and again, using poetry as a shield to resist the rapid decay and frivolity of time.

"Explosion" is Chen Nianxi's masterpiece of poetry and his most important work as a "miner's poet". It contains 153 of his poems, from the turbulent life in the mines to the urban survival in Pi Village, Beijing, and covers his difficult explosions Working life, there are also his daily thoughts that combine humanistic imagery and historical nostalgia. The openness and desolation, care and compassion, present a person who is closest to the land. The poems written with a weather-beaten pen have not given up even if they are pushed by fate in various ways. "I spent my middle age at a depth of five thousand meters/I exploded the rock formations again and again/Through this/I reassembled my life." The weight of each word struck down contains tremendous power.

"Miner's Poet" and writer Chen Nianxi's 2025 masterpiece. This book takes the hotel as its carrier and once again presents a group of ordinary and simple workers, including miners, river backers, charcoal burners, Nanyang hawkers, old students from the county theater troupe, printer Lao Jiao, Feng Qinshi, Liu Suona... The book has no ups and downs of emotional entanglements, nor fierce life and death struggles. Instead, it depicts the story of these ordinary people like us, running around for a living, looking for that "way to live." Life may be like a journey. We are all running and wandering in this world, being escorted by fate to live in a panic, feeling trapped, sad, and feeling tenderness in it. And it is precisely the lives and destiny of these unknown people that make people want to live as pure and down-to-earth as they do.

As a tunnel blaster, Chen Nianxi dived to a depth of 5,000 meters in the earth, blasting open mountains with explosives and pickaxes, and chiseling out gold, silver, copper, iron, and nickel. Along with him were Wang Er, Decheng, Xiao Zhazi and others who had the same low fate. Later, some people ran into a cloud of blood mist in the explosion, and some were cut in half by the air waves. Only he was relatively lucky, leaving only a dislocated cervical spine, pneumoconiosis, and a deaf right ear. Opening "To Live is to Shout to the Sky", these tragic and blazing lives will appear in front of you one by one. Hard work, unpredictable life and death, every story is as hard and black as the stones Chen Nianxi knocked down deep in the mine.

I have seen so much misfortune that I have never been depressed. --Chen Nianxi. This book contains 21 original non-fiction essays by Chen Nianxi. The book tells the story of a group of ordinary and simple workers. They are blasters, stone movers, country carpenters, farmers, farm women, small workshop owners... And the writer's own story runs throughout: blasting rocks five kilometers underground, raising a family amidst the smoke and roar, writing poems in work sheds and in the mountains, recording the explosion and silence of fate. Although they have gone through the hardships of life, they are simple and tough, and they calmly tell life themes about family, love, death, and desire... This is a book of life and a book of death. In the final analysis, it is a book of life. What does the world look like? What is life like? In my feeling, except for the long and ubiquitous wind, the rest is dust. We rush around in it, trying to stand firm, but most of the time we stagger around and can't help ourselves.