The rupture tense Poems

Jenny Xie

Book - 2022

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Subjects
Genres
Poetry
Published
Minneapolis, Minnesota : Graywolf Press [2022]
Language
English
Main Author
Jenny Xie (author)
Physical Description
110 pages ; 23 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references
ISBN
9781644452011
  • Controlled Exposure
  • Red Puncta
  • Red Puncta
  • Memory Soldier
  • Red Puncta
  • Red Puncta
  • Red Puncta
  • The Game
  • No Vector
  • The Rupture Tense
  • Deep Storage
  • Broken Proverbs
  • Deep Storage
  • 1968 Stereoscope
  • 1976 Stereoscope
  • 1977 Stereoscope
  • Expenditures
  • Postmemory
  • Reaching Saturation
  • Present Continuous
  • Meeting Places
  • Misconjugate
  • The Made World
  • Territories Unmapped
  • Present Continuous
  • Unit of Measure
  • In Search Of
  • Distance Sickness
  • Notes
  • Acknowledgments
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

The restless, luminous second book from Xie (Eye Level) weaves a web of family and ancestral history, aesthetics, and intergenerational trauma. Xie begins with a cycle of poems addressing the work of photographer Li Zhensheng, which depict the atrocities of Mao's regime and create an atmosphere of dread that permeates the collection: "The disappeared./ The executed, slender backs to the firing squad./ How close Li had to stand to acquire their expressions, close/ enough he could smell the spume of blood and of brain matter." Poems weave back and forth in time as she visits relatives in China in the present. The final cycle of poems is an elegy for the poet's grandmother that evokes the ways that an absence can be omnipresent: "Nowhere am I rubbing a filament of 1958 against 2020// Nowhere is there a visual shock, two years sparking an omitted detail// Somewhere a generation of faces melts onto the last generation's// Somewhere we keep attaching to the boundless unknowable." Xie's detached and precise language in the earlier poems echoes the oppressive climate of the Revolution and makes the more emotionally charged poems hit harder. This is a devastating master class in subtlety. (Sept.)

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Review by Library Journal Review

Xie follows up her National Book Award/PEN Open Book Award finalist Eye Level with a study of ruptured borders--between past and present, silence and speaking--as she explores diaspora, repression, intergenerational trauma, and the long-term consequences of the Chinese Cultural Revolution

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