Read Anywhere and on Any Device!

Subscribe to Read | $0.00

Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!

Create Free Account

Quick and Easy Sign Up!

It takes less then 1 minute to sign up, then you can enjoy Unlimited eBooks.

Sign Up Browse

Read Anywhere and on Any Device!

  • Download on iOS
  • Download on Android
  • Download on iOS

The Past (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Wendy Xu
4.27/5 (72 ratings)
Read Now Download Now
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 Tian'anmen 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 "Tian'anmen Square sonnets" (and their subsequent erasures), to conjure up the irrepressible past, and ultimately imagine a new kind of poem: at once code and confession.

"Tian'anmen Sonnet" (dead air in air ... )

Dead air in air
The anniversary of language
holds you back against
bucolic dreaming, down stream
from here is running
a miraculous color, elegy

bursts like a ribbon in air
Thinking again of the Square today
Bold sky, passing episodes of cloud
Vegetation mutters in the Far West

A column of ghosts
going violet over time
Familiar song looping overhead
Lines pressed in air
Format:
Pages:
pages
Publication:
Publisher:
Edition:
Language:
ISBN10:
0819580457
ISBN13:
9780819580450
kindle Asin:
B099QLJ73C

The Past (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Wendy Xu
4.27/5 (72 ratings)
Read Download
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 Tian'anmen 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 "Tian'anmen Square sonnets" (and their subsequent erasures), to conjure up the irrepressible past, and ultimately imagine a new kind of poem: at once code and confession.

"Tian'anmen Sonnet" (dead air in air ... )

Dead air in air
The anniversary of language
holds you back against
bucolic dreaming, down stream
from here is running
a miraculous color, elegy

bursts like a ribbon in air
Thinking again of the Square today
Bold sky, passing episodes of cloud
Vegetation mutters in the Far West

A column of ghosts
going violet over time
Familiar song looping overhead
Lines pressed in air
Format:
Pages:
pages
Publication:
Publisher:
Edition:
Language:
ISBN10:
0819580457
ISBN13:
9780819580450
kindle Asin:
B099QLJ73C

More Books

Look: Poems

Solmaz Sharif

Middlemarch

George Eliot

Pure Colour

Sheila Heti

Invisible Man

Ralph Ellison

Bluets

Maggie Nelson

Dog Songs: Poems

Mary Oliver

M Train

Patti Smith

Things I Didn't Do with This Body (The Lannan Literary Selections)

Amanda Gunn

Curb

Divya Victor

Customs: Poems

Solmaz Sharif

How to Dress a Fish

Abigail Chabitnoy

The Carrying

Ada Limon