The Past
(Wesleyan Poetry Series, 2021)
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Best Books of 2021, The Boston Globe
Best Poetry Books of 2021, Entropy Magazine
Elegiac and searching, poems written in the long shadow of immigration
The poems in Wendy Xu's third collection, The Past, fantasize uneasily about becoming a palatable lyric record of their namesake, while ultimately working to disrupt this Westernized desire. Born in Shandong, China, in 1987, Wendy Xu immigrated to the United States in 1989, three days ahead of the events of Tiananmen Square. The Past probes the multi-generational binds of family, displacement, and immigration as an ongoing psychic experience without end. Moving spontaneously between lyric, fragment, prose, and subversions in "traditional" Chinese forms, the book culminates in a centerpiece series of "Tiananmen Sonnets" (and their subsequent erasures), to conjure up the irrepressible past, and ultimately imagine a new kind of poem: at once code and confession.
Read more selections from the book below:
Granta
American Poetry Review
The New Republic
Tin House
Poetry Magazine
Academy of American Poets
Praise:
“Xu’s lyricism and near-painterly control of the line are breathtaking. The Past shows us how the natural world tells of a shared history and language long after the traumas of revolution and immigration. These poems push outward at all of the seams.”
—Wendy S. Walters, author of Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal
“Wendy Xu’s The Past embodies what James Baldwin said about poets, that they must excavate and recreate history. In her brilliant confrontations with the past, Xu is cultivating, caring for, and ultimately transforming the consciousness and the subconscious ground of poetry's faithful yet fearless engagement with history, out of which descendant generations will approach and appraise, by the profound permission of her example, their own cultural and familial histories, and therefore all of our futures.”
—Brandon Shimoda, author of The Grave on the Wall
“These poems offer readers a memorable exploration of the “fantasy and nightmare” of “immigrant dreams.””
—Publisher’s Weekly
“If, as Faulkner said, the past is never dead, it’s not even past, then Wendy Xu’s third collection reckons with history as slipping around the margins of living memory […]
Notably, The Past contains a sequence of Tiananmen Sonnets, a form invented by Xu that experiments with combinations of either 6 or 4 lines and words. Accompanying these meditative sonnets are greyed-out columns of text, erasures representing the outlines of tanks “Punching through time.” The conceit is thought-provoking and precise, recalling the register of Liu Xiaobo’s June Fourth Elegies.”
—Jay G Ying, Poetry Foundation / Harriet Books
Phrasis
(Fence, 2017)
Available from:
Fence Books
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Powell's
10 Best Poetry Books of 2017, The New York Times
13 Best Poetry Books of 2017, BuzzFeed
Best Poetry Books of 2017, Chicago Review of Books
Winner of the Ottoline Prize, selected by Hoa Nguyen
Wendy Xu articulates the whole world by freezing it all at once, looking closely at its parts, and zeroing in on the one image or phrase or feeling that makes the day seem possibly beautiful under all the scaffolding, sirens, and other natural (analog and online) interruptions that make up daily living.
"Xu’s tendency toward abstraction is an attempt to protect (rather than obscure or erase) the personal, the sacred, and the private. In one fragment, the poet names her accumulation of poetic matter as “A catalogue then, of the present as it shifts into rose view.” To read this catalogue is to see the world transformed through Xu’s attentiveness to the possibilities of language in a surveillance-riddled landscape."
—Publisher's Weekly
"Xu’s warmly intelligent collection is phrase-based, as you might expect given the title, and thus does its work through juxtaposition, quick shifts and odd, dreamlike combinations (“The cactus blooms itself / in air, is going places, is not / and never has been a vision / of anyone’s hand / laboring nightly…”)."
—David Orr, New York Times Book Review
"Wendy Xu's collection Phrasis challenges the conventions of language, grammar and syntax (and, effectively, the roles they play in our lives) in carefully fragmented poems. A fresh, thought-provoking collection that bends all the rules in the right ways"
—BuzzFeed
“Wendy Xu’s second full length book of poetry, Phrasis, is steeped in generosity and pain. It cuts through the page with language that boils and bubbles over.”
—Chicago Review of Books
"The poems in this collection play word against words, expression against frame. Is language a form of thought-bondage? How can poems escape and bring us closer to the personal and the possibility of intimacy? Phrasis might form an answer; Xu writes: “My source text was unresponsive and so varying methods, slashed it /pink instead”. Her poems provide a way out and in: they slide in the making, a kind of sleight of hand inside the mind of language, freeing us to imagine and slice or “likewise lurch/ and stutter”—marvelously so: “tenderly/ a finger set/ to music”."
—Hoa Nguyen
"Wendy Xu's new book is interested in the fragment as the unit of composition to understand a world. With uncanny detail her images open and her diction blooms to build a complex psychology for the present moment. This is an interior work and high minded, full of daring and bravado."
—Peter Gizzi
"Wendy Xu’s new collection of poems sends a spiritual charge through the language we use in our everyday speech, and in so doing, illumines the various manners of our speaking, some hushed, some hesitant, and all of them as revelatory as snow that "proposes slowly to us an order.”"
—Tan Lin
"Each section opens with a short untitled poem, held almost as Greek chorus, setting the tone for what follows. Xu’s poems might, as the back cover suggests, revel in the fragment, but does as much in the small moment, composing less a fragment than a short burst that requires no further explanation. Her poems are wonderfully self-contained, yet interact in a way that the entire collection could be considered a lyric suite, composing a whole unit of smaller parts."
—Rob Mclennan
"My new favorite poet! Wendy Xu, through fragments and shattered (shattering) observations, reveals the violence and indifference of our culture normally concealed behind what we call the everyday."
—Chris Carosi, City Lights Bookstore
"Right now, I’m reading Wendy Xu’s incredible new book Phrasis alongside my revisiting of Dante’s Inferno. Xu’s meditations on political and personal ruptures, enacted through a dissociated tone while employing a sharp and searing gaze, amplifies the effects political oppression has on one’s language—among other things."
—Ocean Vuong
You Are Not Dead
(Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2013)
"That fluctuating space between the temporary and the infinite is an erogenous zone made all the more enticing when articulated so eloquently. ‘We have a lifespan and O how we live it out.’ Wendy Xu’s poems posit for us a future, a presence, a body resistant to the ravages of time. Mortality is a far planet. Here in Xu’s work, we are passionately, and gratefully, alive."
—D.A. Powell
"In You Are Not Dead Wendy Xu breaks all the old rules that have never done us any favors anyway. She writes beautifully, noticing who we are, and letting us see ourselves with a little more humanity, a little more humor, a little more humility. I’m happy to have read this book."
—James Tate
"There's a wild and wondrous poet plundering through our lives, collecting the oddest and most significant things, turning our thoughts towards things we couldn't have known before she turned us toward them. You Are Not Dead is precisely how this book can get you to feel and that is an almost other-wordly power. The poet who imagines and builds these poems is irresistible."
—Dara Wier
"What I’m trying to say is that Wendy Xu has found the secret location where wisdom and the imagination connect, and she’s such a good friend that she’s giving you wisdom, invaluable wisdom, so that you can understand life as well as she does. And I don’t mean she writes an imaginative wisdom, I mean the wisdom she expresses to You, her good friend in every poem, is built out of a logic that could have only originated in an imagined world."
—Kent Shaw, for The Rumpus
"Xu’s poems deftly navigate the space between the often-obscured personal and the dominant external."
—Raena Shirali, for The Journal
"Bounding with energy, the poems in You Are Not Dead are like Jehovah’s Witnesses on amphetamines, beating down your door to tell you about The Word. Or a word. Or a whole bunch of words. Or maybe just to throw you a party that celebrates life and everyone’s eventual demise."
—Nick DePascal, for Colorado Review
"Rather than ridicule or even contempt, Xu’s speaker observes the event with a kind of wry wit and compassion, simultaneously. This is a work that never fails to celebrate its title cause–the act of being alive as itself an event worth marking and celebrating. The author has a compassionate way of giving the beauty and complexity she sees around her back to the reader."
—Melissa Leigh Gore
