The Rupture Tense
Poems
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
* 2023 PEN OAKLAND JOSEPHINE MILES BOOK AWARD WINNER *
* FINALIST FOR THE 2022 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY *
* FINALIST FOR THE 2023 BALCONES PRIZE FOR POETRY *
The astounding second collection by Jenny Xie, “a magician of perspective and scale” (The New Yorker)
Shaped around moments of puncture and release, The Rupture Tense registers what leaks across the breached borders between past and future, background and foreground, silence and utterance. In polyphonic and formally restless sequences, Jenny Xie cracks open reverberant, vexed experiences of diasporic homecoming, intergenerational memory transfer, state-enforced amnesia, public secrecies, and the psychic fallout of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Across these poems, memory—historical, collective, personal—stains and erodes. Xie voices what remains irreducible in our complex entanglements with familial ties, language, capitalism, and the histories in which we find ourselves lodged.
The Rupture Tense begins with poems provoked by the photography of Li Zhensheng, whose negatives, hidden under his floorboards to avoid government seizure, provide one of the few surviving visual archives of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and concludes with an aching elegy for the poet’s grandmother, who took her own life shortly after the end of the Revolution. This extraordinary collection records the aftershocks and long distances between those years and the present, echoing out toward the ongoing past and a trembling future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
